Yunhee Min Featured in Artforum's "Must See" Guide
"Vitreous Opacities" at Vielmetter Los Angeles is currently featured on Artforum’s “Must-See Shows” list, the editors' selection of essential exhibitions worldwide.
Louise Fishman 1939 - 2021
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing away of artist and friend, Louise Fishman, at the age of 82. Our heartfelt condolences go out to her partner, Ingrid Nyeboe, her family, and her close community of friends, artists, poets, musicians, and spiritual practitioners.
Born in Philadelphia in 1939, Louise Fishman forged a unique and prolific career — five decades of consistently manifesting the energy and vision required to create a more aesthetically generous world. In lineage with such painters as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell as well as finding influence through friendships with artists Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, Fishman developed an articulate and athletic approach to painterly abstraction merging the hard-edge objectivity of the grid and the gestural subjectivity of expressionism, all the while developing a language for art-making rooted in her identities as Jewish, feminist, and lesbian.
Working with Louise was an absolute honor; her distinguished career, her feminism, her activism, and her oeuvre of dynamic paintings are a combined act of fortitude and grace.
A retrospective of works on paper, A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing will be on view August 2021 — February 25, 2022, at the Krannert Art Museum, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Curated by Amy Powell, A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing will be the first career-spanning exhibition and publication of Fishman’s works on paper, including more than 100 works from the artist’s archive that have rarely been exhibited alongside significant institutional and private loans.
Raffi Kalenderian Acquired by The Georgia Museum of Art
Raffi Kalenderian's painting “Julia Perry,” 2020 was acquired by the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia as a promised gift of John and Sara Shlesinger.
Wangechi Mutu Reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail
"Despite Mutu’s trenchant critique, the placement of her work suggests an equivocal answer to the exhibition title. I am Speaking, Can You Hear Me? (2020) consists of a pair of figures facing each other. Large conch shells and sections of wood function as oversized ears, as though to magnify their listening capabilities. The two figures might hear what is said, but are they paying attention? One of them enacts a deception surely familiar to anyone who has been an unwilling confidant: an ear toward its neighbor, it feigns attentiveness while peering over the other’s shoulder toward the gallery’s Flemish paintings. These works include portraits of severe Dutch courtiers resplendent in lace cuffs and winking gold rings, several of which gaze past Mutu’s sculpture onto an expanse of lilac-hued wall. The gallery is an example of self-containment—hearing without listening."
By Jess Chen - 14 July 2021
Dave McKenzie in Conversation with Adrienne Edwards
On the occasion of the exhibition Dave McKenzie: The Story I Tell Myself, McKenzie speaks with Adrienne Edwards, the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, to discuss his twenty-year practice, his artistic influences, and his recently completed Whitney-commissioned performance Disturbing the View.
Dave McKenzie in Conversation in The Brooklyn Rail
"Disturbing the View at the Whitney is a performance happening throughout the summer by New York-based artist Dave McKenzie. McKenzie uses window-washing instruments to activate the museum’s floor-to-ceiling windows by repeatedly, and rhythmically, apply a chalky substance. This action indeed disturbs the view to the stunning vistas overlooking Lower Manhattan.
A small survey of McKenzie’s filmed performances over the last 20 years is staged on the third floor, and grounds Disturbing the View in the artist’s explorations into the everyday performance of moving through space. In this June 2021 conversation, we talk about grocery stores, adolescence, and the desire to make art that we want to see in the world."
By Maddie Klett - 14 July 2021
Kennedy Yanko Profiled in Vogue
"The St. Louis-born, Brooklyn-based artist recently completed a residency at Miami’s Rubell museum, where she focused on making her paint skin work “bigger and more luscious,” she says. “I had the space and support to work at a scale that my heart’s always wanted to, which gave me the confidence to go big going forward.” Her works can stretch 15 feet wide and 20 feet tall."
By Akili King - 11 July 2021
Sarah Cain at the Tang Teaching Museum
"Sarah Cain is an artist who explores and expands upon traditional ideas of painting, often modifying canvases by cutting and braiding, painting on all sides, and installing the canvas with the back of the painting facing the viewer. She also paints on other surfaces, including interior and exterior walls, floors, and dollar bills, and often includes found objects such as crystals, feathers, beads, and other items she has a personal attachment to. Her process involves many layers of altering a composition—a cycle of creation and destruction that, in part, revolves around self-discovery. Cain describes herself as a feminist painter, using elements seen as feminine as an act of non-conformity and as an alternative to the traditional hierarchies of painting."
Sarah Cain acquired by Orange County Museum of Art
"Zuckerman made operational changes to the building as well — mostly tweaks related to security, staff offices or visitor experience. She added five board trustees and nailed down the new opening date. She also began acquiring art, beginning with an “eight-talisman installation” by L.A. artist Sarah Cain.
“Eight is the number of infinite abundance,” Zuckerman says. “They’re painted dollar bills suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire. The backs are silver or gold and the fronts are vibrant [colors]. I tell our team, ‘Walk under them, tell them what you need!’”
By Deborah Vankin - 14 June 2021
Genevieve Gaignard in Beyond the Looking Glass at UTA Artist Space
UTA Artist Space is pleased to present Beyond the Looking Glass, a group exhibition of surrealist takes by women about women. Beyond the Looking Glass is curated by gallery director Zuzanna Ciolek, one of the first members of the UTA Fine Arts team when it was established in 2015.
The ambitious exhibition fills all three gallery spaces with bold works by a cross-generational group of fourteen women-identifying artists: Firelei Báez, Tawny Chatmon, Charlotte Colbert, Kim Dacres, Florine Démosthène, Genevieve Gaignard, Sanam Khatibi, Klara Kristalova, Shannon T. Lewis, Jesse Mockrin, GaHee Park, Hiba Schahbaz, Kiki Smith, and Jessica Stoller.
“While organizing this exhibition, I enjoyed poking holes in traditional standards of beauty in art and pop culture,” said exhibition curator and UTA Artist Space director Zuzanna Ciolek. “And within that playful and provocative framework, the show aims to explore contemporary femininity and representation.”
Beyond the Looking Glass presents a new lens for representation through surreal and uncanny artworks that address sexuality, race, and identity— radically defying solely ornamental representation. Taking inspiration from Alice in Wonderland, the title Beyond the Looking Glass is a twist on Through the Looking Glass, moving beyond a world where women are being seen as purely ornamental. The exhibition pulls viewers into an unexpected world filled with surrealist characters such as an elephant girl, a pink “C-section” vessel equipped with breasts, and a woman riding a reptile. While disrupting traditional portraiture of the Western Canon and confronting stereotypical representations of women, the figures portrayed transcend these societal constraints. With these archaic indicators of femininity stripped away, the surreal and expressionist imagery allows her to break out, expanding beyond the body.
Sarah Cain at The National Gallery of Art
Sarah Cain’s energetic installation jumps the bounds of a 45-foot-long painted canvas to integrate a variety of surfaces in the East Building’s Atrium. Extending onto the nearby protective sculpture enclosures and well covers, Cain’s painted elements surround and complement the canvas to create a dynamic installation that encourages movement and close looking. To the canvas, the artist applied sculptural elements of torn, cut, sewn, draped, and beaded sections, with additions of silver and gold leaf and paint rollers, inviting discovery and drawing from wide-ranging sources. The title of My favorite season is the fall of the patriarchy is lifted from a coffee mug. In this installation, Cain generates a flow of abstract moments between hard-edged shapes that traverse an atmospheric spray-painted backdrop to create a riotously colored work dynamically playing between painting and sculpture.
Initially, Cain had planned to paint directly on the temporary walls and enclosures on site. When the pandemic prevented her travel, she adapted her approach. After painting seven eight-by-seven-foot canvases in her Los Angeles studio, she then shipped them to the National Gallery, where they were installed across the long wall. The artist also oversaw (via video) National Gallery staff who painted three protective sculpture enclosures and three planter well covers. These structural elements surround and complement the painting, which floats in an energized arena animated by Cain’s bright palette.
On view June 18, 2021 - Spring 2022
Limited Edition Print by Math Bass
Vielmetter Los Angeles — in collaboration with Cultured Magazine — is pleased to announce the launch of a new editioned print by Los Angeles artist Math Bass.
This distinctly graphic print is from the artist's ongoing series entitled Newz!; a seamlessly sophisticated composition informed by the artist’s signature visual lexicon of symbols and shapes. Screen printing by Tom Kracauer, Los Angeles with additional lithography by Francesco Siqueiros (El Nopal Press). Printed on Coventry Rag; 100% cotton and acid free.
Math Bass "Newz!," 2021
Limited edition screen print + lithograph
21 x 19 inches (53.34 x 48.26 cm) paper size
Edition of 50; Signed, dated, editioned on verso
Courtesy of the artist, Vielmetter Los Angeles, and Cultured Magazine
Photo credit: Jeff McLane
2000 USD
Hugo McCloud at The Aldrich
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents from where i stand, the first solo museum exhibition of Hugo McCloud. McCloud’s work has been defined by a restless experimentation, an ongoing engagement with process, an exploration of the value of labor, a concern with disparities in social and racial economics, and with the nature of beauty. McCloud’s earlier work can generally be categorized as abstraction, with its veiled subject matter growing out of his experiences of being biracial and his family’s working-class roots. These influences are evident in the materials and process he gravitates to—roofing metal, tar, and most recently plastic shopping bags. He has consistently used non-art mediums to encode social and cultural memory and to reflect on notions of race, class, and economic inequity. His latest figurative works, which were influenced by his move to Mexico in 2018, are composed of single-use plastic bags, depicting workers transporting towering piles of goods on bicycles, motorcycles, and their backs, as well as the overfilled carts of the homeless and indigent. Increasingly, his work speaks of the economics of labor and geopolitics on a fundamental level, while encapsulating the artist’s interest in global culture. from where i stand will occupy The Aldrich’s entire first floor and will include approximately thirty-five works borrowed from both private collections and the artist.
Karl Haendel Acquired by The Hammer Museum
Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Double Dominant 4 (Rodney McMillian), 2018 by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. This drawing was included in Haendel's 2020 exhibition Double Dominant at Vielmetter Los Angeles.
The exhibition featured monumental drawings of the dominant hands, doubled, of 24 LA based artists of Haendel’s generation. These highly rendered drawings, for which the artist digitally manipulated the dominant hand of each subject to impossibly interact with itself, ask us to consider labor, time, human touch and individual style in relationship to the practice of making art. The project also reflects the artist's deep commitment to his community of artists, and the high value he places on dialogue and conversation within that community. A volume reproducing the complete set of works, published by Triangle Books with an essay by Natilee Harren, accompanied the exhibition.
Patrick Wilson included in Break + Bleed at San Jose Museum of Art
"Drawn primarily from SJMA’s permanent collection, Break + Bleed features both paintings and works on paper by historically significant artists who exemplify the spirit of post-painterly abstraction through an expansive range of styles including hard-edge abstraction, Color Field painting, Op art, Minimalism, and soft-edge abstraction. Artworks in this exhibition feature biomorphic and geometric shapes, angular and wavy lines, and lively planes of color. The work of Josef Albers—from his celebrated series devoted to the square, exploring the subjective experience of color—may be the most recognizable. For Karl Benjamin, interlocking and sometimes twisted shapes created energetic color associations and incongruous patterns. This exhibition also features contemporary artists like Linda Besemer, Patrick Wilson, and others who are pushing post-painterly abstraction into new territories."
Friday, June 4, 2021–Sunday, April 3, 2022
Organized by Rory Padeken, curator
Nicole Eisenman "Giant Without a Body" Now on View!
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on the opening of Giant without a body, a survey of the artist's work from 2006 through the present at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo.
Amy Sillman and Wangechi Mutu reviewed in The New York Times
“Affinities for Abstraction: Women Artists on Eastern Long Island, 1950-2020” Parrish Art Museum
"Contemporary makers like Amy Sillman, who painted “C” (2007), and Jacqueline Humphries and Virginia Jaramillo are included, too, delineating the connections among generations."
“Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?” Legion of Honor Museum
"The Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, who splits time between Nairobi and New York, has made many museum appearances, including in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, but this is among her biggest solo exhibitions."
By Ted Loos - 21 May 2021
Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Genevieve Gaignard in "Photo Flux" at Getty Center
Artists Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Genevieve Gaignard are featured in "Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA" at The Getty Center. On view May 25 - October 10, 2021.
"Photographs by 35 Los Angeles-based artists challenge ideals of beauty, representation, cultural capital, and objectivity. The artists in this exhibition, primarily people of color, have radically transformed photography to express their own aesthetics, identities, and narratives. Their work is foundational for an emerging generation of artists participating in the Getty Unshuttered program, which engages teens to seek photography as a platform to amplify social topics that resonate in their own lives."
Curated by jill moniz
Ruben Ochoa Fundraising Print II
Now available in our webshop: Ruben Ochoa's second limited-edition fundraising print supporting The Street Vendor Emergency Fund!
Your purchase of Ruben Ochoa's LACMA x Snapchat fundraising print directly supports the initiative of Inclusive Action's emergency Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign. The funds from each individual print will translate directly to a $400 cash card for street vendors and their families, many of whom have not been eligible to receive direct pandemic relief funding from the government.
¡Vendedores, Presente! responds to L.A.’s shared history with street vendors. Ruben Ochoa draws attention to the region’s familiar fruit carts, paleteros, and flower stands creating a large-scale immersive environment that calls for solidarity with vendor advocacy. This project is part of LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives.
Deborah Roberts Featured in Sotheby's
"In Deborah Roberts: I’m, the artist’s first solo show in Texas, the powerhouse artist continues investigating ideas of beauty, race, happiness and safety through depictions of Black children. Originally meant to open September 2020, the exhibition was postponed to January 2021 due to the pandemic. Roberts used those quiet quarantine months to edit the exhibition deeper and go bigger. The pandemic revealed the preciousness of human life, and fueled the collagist to heighten existing mixed media pieces. Black children needed to be seen and affirmed on a grander scale."
By Jasmin Hernandez -19 May 2021
Rodney McMillian in Our House: Selections from MoCA's collection
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Rodney McMillian on his inclusion in Our House: Selections from MoCA's collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, organized by Bennett Simpson. The White House II, 2020, on view at MoCA, was acquired for the museum's permanent collection earlier this year. The exhibition opens to the public on June 3rd.
Rodney McMillian in The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Rodney McMillian on his inclusion in The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts opening May 22, 2021.
Esther Pearl Watson Featured in The Pool
"Through dozens of small, colorful paintings, Esther Pearl Watson (Art MFA 12) depicts a rapidly changing world in which the once mundane is juxtaposed against an unprecedented crisis. As the pandemic continued, Watson’s desire to document everyday life in its midst grew stronger.
Watson spent the last year creating a visual diary. It’s a trip to the neighborhood grocery store, but there’s a line outside and the store is completely out of toilet paper. A family goes on a walk in their neighborhood, but they’re all wearing masks. As the days dragged on, Watson felt a growing desire to document this new normal."
By Juliet Bennett Rylah - 14 May 2021
Wangechi Mutu Reviewed in The Guardian
"A new exhibition at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?, speaks to this moment. A concerted effort to decolonize the museum as it reopened this week after a Covid-induced hibernation, it consists of recent works by the Kenyan-American artist situated throughout the Legion’s galleries, rather than in one or two rooms. There, her works exist in dialogue with the Legion’s Eurocentric permanent collection, a reflection of the sensibilities of the industrialists who endowed it a century ago. In all, I Am Speaking is a pulse of transgression throughout this staid secular temple."
By Peter-Astrid Kane - 8 May 2021
Wangechi Mutu Exhibition opens at Legion of Honor
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Wangechi Mutu on the opening of I'm Speaking, Are You Listening, a survey of the artist's work, curated by Claudia Schmuckli, at the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Franciso.
"Over the past two decades, Wangechi Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings, and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the power and need for new mythologies—the productive friction of opposites beyond simple binaries and stereotypes—Mutu breaches common distinctions among human, animal, plant, and machine. At once seductive and threatening, her figures and environments take the viewer on journeys of material, psychological, and sociopolitical transformation."
Deborah Roberts Featured in Art in America
"Born in 1962 in Austin, Texas, Roberts makes work that can be understood, from one angle, as a reimagining of the Black twentieth century through mixed-media art on paper. Her art centers the social worlds of Black children. Through the use of an ever-expanding range of materials, Roberts animates the still figures of these young people set against a sharp white background in more ways than one: they throw up peace signs, they strut and dance, stand defiantly with hands in pockets, sit on the floor with palms locked in front of their shins, defend one another by placing their arms between the body of a friend and the world of the viewer."
By Joshua Bennett - 4 May 2021
Genevieve Gaignard in Girl You Want at ArtYard
"ArtYard is pleased to present, Girl You Want, curated by J. Vanessa Lyon and featuring artists Genevieve Gaignard, Julia Greenburger, Jen Liu, Josh Rabineau, Wendy and Beatrice Red Star, Karinne Smith, Ivy Stewart, and María Vargas Aguilar.
What’s a girl? What do you expect from a girl or want girlhood to be? How are girls un/made? Are they pieced together, imagined, constructed? This exhibition examines what girling looks and feels like through a range of representational strategies, from portraiture to speculative narrative; from dress to interiors and the prettified materials of commodification and colonization. In this show “girl” and “girly” are not offered as stable or essential but are rather understood as shifting states untethered to “sex” or even age."
Dave McKenzie in Frieze
"Trained in printmaking, McKenzie is undaunted by the rote repetition of ordinary tasks, or by a confrontation with the same. In these works – both of which are now on view as part of ‘The Story I Tell Myself ’, the artist’s solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York – recursion is a conduit through which McKenzie articulates his semi-private realism: moments that, to evoke the writer Samuel R. Delany, come ‘blaring in through the five senses’ (Dhalgren, 1975), and so resist easy consolidation. McKenzie’s elegiac form is a reminder of the debts of our cultural and political ancestors, which we do not inherit, but that we become. "
By Shiv Kotecha - 19 April 2021
Dave McKenzie Featured in Artforum
"This month, “Dave McKenzie: The Story I Tell Myself” opens at the Whitney. Curated by Adrienne Edwards, the exhibition pairs McKenzie’s videos with a selection of works from the museum’s collection by, among others, Bruce Nauman, Trisha Brown, and Pope.L. On Fridays and Saturdays, McKenzie plans to be on-site to “wash” the exterior of the museum’s floor-to-ceiling windows with a viscous mixture that will do more to obscure the view than clear it up, recapitulating how “squeegee men” used to soap up the windshields of cars stuck in traffic before a Giuliani-era crackdown in the mid-’90s."
By Colby Chamberlain - May 2021
Ruben Ochoa Event at LACMA
In celebration of Ruben Ochoa’s project for LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives, view a short documentary series that follows street vendors as they unpack the history of the vending economy in Los Angeles, their efforts to organize and build sustainable businesses, the challenges and threats they face in this work environment, and the great impact the pandemic has had on this community.
Math Pearl Bass in Conversation April 30th
Join us for a FREE virtual conversation with Suzanne Hudson, Math Bass, and Christina Quarles (via Zoom) on April 30 at 5 pm PST! In her forthcoming book "Contemporary Painting" (Thames and Hudson, April 2021), Los Angeles-based art historian and critic Suzanne Hudson considers painting as a vibrant and sometimes contentious critic of a dynamic global society.
During this talk, Hudson is joined by two esteemed painters, Math Bass and Christina Quarles, featured in the book. This event is moderated by curator James Glisson from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Alexandra Terry from the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.
Ruben Ochoa Featured in the Los Angeles Times
"An enormous piece of Mexican street corn, slathered in chile powder and Cotija cheese, is soaring over MacArthur Park on Tuesday morning. A runaway orange bounces in the foreground; fruit carts with rainbow-colored sunshades float in the sky.
The augmented reality artwork, “¡Vendedores Presente!” by Ruben Ochoa, is one of five virtual monuments debuting Tuesday, geolocated to sites across the city in a project from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat."
By Deborah Vankin - 13 April 2021
Patrick Wilson Reviewed in Artillery
"In this regard, “Keeping Time” is a stroke of mastery. Wilson’s frame within frame style always manages to keep you on your toes as the works, never culminating, constantly build and subtract within themselves. We can see this effect in a work titled Afternoon Breeze (2020). A patch of blue, in one place vibrant, melts into the red background with a mild transparency, and is harshly bisected by a think pink frame. Nearby, a pink and orange frame overlaps a field of subtly gradating maroon and sienna, capturing on one end a shred of the hot pink background. Finally, the offset canvases abutting at a hard right angle throw the entire work into a rectilinear staccato."
By Cole Sweetwod - 31 March 2021
Hayv Kahraman Reviewed in Whitehot Magazine
"Kahraman depicts a feminine self which is not one but a fragmented “subject” formed from a network of cultural discourses. “She” embodies the weight of history, injuries, invisible scars and traumas female survivors carry around until they can heal and build a bridge from the past into the future. Because Kahraman uses her personal memories of trauma to address collective trauma, her paintings have a universal relevance. Although her mnemonic paintings are disturbing, they are concerned with the art of mending physical and psychic wounds. "
By Lita Barrie - 31 March 2021
Andrea Bowers: UC DAVIS Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Wednesday, April 7 — 4:30 PM PDT
Through documenting contemporary activists focused on women’s rights, migrant justice, workers’ rights and climate justice, Andrea Bowers is committed to an intersectional feminism that dismantles gender privilege and builds community. Her multivalent art practice documents and honors the activists whose everyday actions forge meaningful change. Bowers is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Capitain Petzel in Berlin, Kauffman Repetto in Milan, and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco.
To register please follow the link below.
Deborah Roberts Reviewed in Frieze
"‘I’m’ demonstrates the range of ways the artist explores underrepresented narratives. Upon entering the gallery, visitors are welcomed by three of Roberts’s text-based works: La’ Condrea is a noun. (2020), We ≥ They (2020) and Anqwenique is mild as milk (2020). The titles of each work correspond to text silk-screened on sheets of paper, roughly the size of picket-signs. Both La’ Condrea is a noun., and Anqwenique is mild as milk, bear a red spell-check squiggle under the girls’ names – an indicator of how even these girls’ names are policed by computer software."
By Lise Ragbir - 19 March 2021
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery Acquires Works by Steve Roden
Congratulations to Steve Roden whose work has been acquired by The Frances Young Tang Teaching
Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College as part of a gift from Michael O. and Sirje Helder
Gold.
The gift includes works created in the 1990s
and 2000s by a diverse group of leading and
emerging artists, including Louise Bourgeois,
Sean Duffy, Naomi Fisher, Iva Gueorguieva,
Michelle Grabner, Carol Hepper, Steve Roden, Jonathan Seliger, Glen Seator, George Stoll, Beverly Semmes, and Barbara Takenaga.
Solo Exhibition — Nicole Eisenman: GIANT WITHOUT A BODY at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo opening soon
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on the opening of Giant without a body, a survey of the artist's work from 2006 through the present at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo.
Amy Sillman Featured in Frieze Magazine
"For more than four decades – across painting, drawing, animation, zines and an increasing corpus of writing – Sillman has combined a dialectics of intimacy and awkwardness, self-deprecation and prowess, figuration and abstraction. She has developed a pragmatic philosophy of painting that mobilizes doubt, treating mark-making not as a grand testament to an artist’s skill but as an invitation for us to follow and think alongside her."
By Tausif Noor - 23 February 2021
Nicole Eisenman Featured in The New Yorker
"Eisenman, who is fifty-five, constructs figurative, narrative images filled with angst, jokes, and art-historical memory. Her work tells stories of broad political inequity—“Huddle” (2018) conjures a surreal and sinister gathering of white men in suits, high above Manhattan—and, more intimately, of solitude and of solidarity, at the beach and in the back gardens of bars. Partly because Eisenman’s creations often trouble to notice how the world looks now, and won’t look forever—a man in Adidas slides; a laptop on the train—they seem likely to survive long enough to carry into the future a clear sense of our present. "
By Ian Parker - 22 February 2021
Deborah Roberts Reviewed in Brooklyn Rail
"I’m features all new work, including figural collage with hand-painted elements and two firsts for the artist: an interactive installation and a grand-scale mural on the building’s exterior. COVID unsurprisingly postponed the show’s opening from September, a strange silver lining which meant more time in the studio. Roberts has acknowledged that the extraordinary events of 2020 began pushing their way into the work. Portraits of Black children took on new meaning after months of lockdown and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. Half a year later, her “kids,” as she calls them, finally occupy The Contemporary’s first floor, challenging a dominant society that all too often denies their beauty and humanity."
By Barbara Purcell - February 2021
Math Bass Interviewed in Cultured
"I visited Math Bass Echo Park studio in the last days of 2020 as they were finishing a new body of work for their solo show, “Desert Veins,” opening a few weeks later at Vielmetter Los Angeles. Over the past six months, I had been receiving texts from Math with images of their paintings in stages, beginning with the faintest underpainting and then building up over weeks with layers of richly colored oil. These paintings becoming paintings arrived to my phone like precious gifts that I viewed over and over again. One week brought the severed head of Anubis and a white gloved hand reaching towards it (what Math calls “anthropological imaging”), the next a snake body wrapped around a pile of eggs. A few weeks of silence followed, and then, as the isolated winter set in, dozens and dozens of paintings of a field of graves began appearing, almost like prayers."
By Isabelle Albuquerque - 15 February 2021
Sarah Cain Featured in Vogue
"From the start of her 15-plus-year career, Cain tells me on Skype, “people always give me the weird spots that they don’t know what to do with.” I’m on the East Coast, and she’s in her Los Angeles studio, surrounded by eight-by-seven-foot canvases that will come together as one painting on a very large, temporary construction wall. “I was really excited about the project. I thought, Okay, I’ll go there and make a massive work on-site.” Part of the fun would be supplanting the “old dudes,” the male 20th-century masters who have always occupied the atrium, and this thought contributed to the show’s title: “My favorite season is the fall of the patriarchy.”"
By Dodie Kazanjian - March 2021
Wangechi Mutu Featured in Wall Street Journal
"In 2019, the Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art included three of her sculptures, and across town the Metropolitan Museum of Art prominently inserted her caryatid sculptures into the niches on the exterior of its building. The show at the Legion of Honor, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, will be among her most significant exhibitions to date, and Mutu and the curators have taken an unusual approach. Instead of dedicating a few spaces to the artist, they will strategically place the 18 works in the museum’s courtyard and throughout its first-floor galleries. The arrangement—meant to offer a critique of colonialism, with African culture asserting itself in multiple Eurocentric spaces—makes it as much an intervention as an exhibition."
By Ted Loos - 4 February 2021
Mary Kelly — Elson Lecture
The Elson Lecture Series features distinguished contemporary artists who are represented in the National Gallery of Art's permanent collection. On June 15, 2020, Kelly presented an overview of her career and discussed her artistic practice with Shelley Langdale, Curator & Head of Modern Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Deborah Roberts Featured in The Wall Street Journal
"Roberts’s new show, I’m, which debuts at the Contemporary Austin January 23, is her first major solo museum exhibition in Texas. I’m features her paintings, signature collages and an interactive sound, text and video sculpture. The museum also commissioned Roberts to create an ongoing installation, a mural on one of its buildings. Titled Little man, little man, a tribute to James Baldwin’s children’s book of the same name, the mural depicts a young Black boy in six different poses of dance and celebration."
By Lane Florsheim - 23 January 2021
Esther Pearl Watson Reviewed in ArtNow
"Watson’s matter of fact, colorful and simplistic style shares affinities with folk artists like Grandma Moses. Her process is to document the everyday, that which surrounds her and is simultaneously banal and in these dire times, disconcerting and unusual. The pieces are at once familiar, stemming from observation, yet also surreal. Her “Pandemic” paintings were created quickly and together create a narrative that traces the uncanny spread of the virus and how it affects the individuals, students, families and communities of Los Angeles."
By Jody Zellen - January 2021
Deborah Roberts Featured in Vogue
"Deborah Roberts is making some of the best work of her life—just ask the artist herself. In “I’m,” a solo exhibition opening this weekend at The Contemporary Austin (her first at a museum in Texas, her home state), Roberts’s interrogations of Black bodies—how they’re seen, and when prejudice diminishes them—have a new urgency. Her figures loom larger in the frame than they used to, claiming more space for themselves. And if Roberts can’t easily explain that shift, what she does know is that it’s working. “I’ve always allowed the work to lead me,” she tells me. “It’s not always been down the right path, but it’s been an exercise, you know? And the work is getting better as it gets larger.”
By Marley Marius - 21 January 2021
Sadie Benning Featured in KCRW
"Most of the works were made in 2019, before any notion of the pandemic infiltrated our daily lives. Yet, looking at these large scale works that encompass one’s field of vision, the process of being deconstructed, ripped apart, and then stitched back together again feels familiar. The show, titled “This is Real” might provide a reminder that the “normal” we came from certainly won’t be the one we return to, and perhaps we will arrive on the other side of this more colorful and dimensional than we were before. "
By Lindsay Preston Zappas - 12 January 2021
Esther Pearl Watson Reviewed in Hyperallergic
"Esther Pearl Watson finds a way to channel the surrounding strangeness of this period — and our collective adapting to an unprecedented time — in Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings at Vielmetter Los Angeles. In more than 100 paintings, the artist froze mundane moments that she observed during the pandemic, which collectively catalogue larger shifts like social distancing, racial uprisings, and economic uncertainty. "
By Eva Recinos - 12 January 2021
Math Bass Featured in Artillery
"Bass’ work is like a ride on the Long Island Rail Road, winding through a certain kind of world, in which crushed skulls and young love happen simultaneously and often unnoticed, where aspiration and reality meet, where the Piano Man’s jar is filled up with cock-like bread, where hearts are broken and lose their three-dimensionality, only to unflatten at the sight of beautiful arms at work on a floor. And then, eventually, you reach the lighthouse, where the water crashes up against the shore, and there you lie, naked, hoping the droning illumination will project you into yet another narrow strip of land filled with memories."
By William J. Simmons - 5 January 2021
Louise Fishman Reviewed in The New Yorker
"Coming of age at the tail end of Abstract Expressionism, the painter went through a number of styles (some of her early works employed language) before distilling her influences, from Agnes Martin and Joan Mitchell to feminist politics, into a potent vocabulary that plays with space in a sometimes languid, sometimes jarring, but always graceful way."
By Hilton Als - December 2020
Esther Pearl Watson Reviewed in LA Weekly
"Watson started the body of work that became Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings in March in the early days of the shelter in place orders in Los Angeles, and the series spans the timeline of the pandemic right through to the days before the show opened at Vielmetter Los Angeles in late November. In a still ongoing series of nearly 200 paintings, each no bigger than a laptop, Watson processes the subtle and cataclysmic changes wrought by a season of public health crises, civil unrest, and political volatility. But she does this through a lens as intimate as the work’s scale, with street views of urban and suburban blocks, one frame at a time."
By Shana Nys Dambrot - 10 December 2020
Rodney McMillian Reviewed in ArtNow LA
"McMillian’s works feel grounded––historically, physically, ideologically––in an arresting and visceral manner, beyond the white cube of Vielmetter. His small paintings are complemented by human-sized cells, constructed from cardboard, fabric and acrylic. These modular, darkened masses are suspended from the walls, implicating viewers in their murky, iconic depths. Motionless, yet organic, these forms serve as manifestations of the lost “accursed share” suggested by McMillian’s constellation of quotations. Juxtaposed with the paintings’ brutal abstraction and panoply of voices, these cardboard assemblages function as doors opening onto a distorted body."
By Josh Wagner - December 2020
Genevieve Gaignard Reviewed in Musée Magazine
"Walking into the exhibition’s installation room, with its dark green motif wallpaper and midcentury wooden furniture, feels like taking a step back in time. Icons of the civil rights movement such as Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy are prominently featured on the walls, and vintage luggage, frames, and rag dolls are strewn about the room."
By Lana Nauphal - 2 December 2020
Kim Dingle Reviewed in ArtForum
"Channeling the formal languages of abstraction into open floor plans, seating arrangements, table settings, and serving suggestions, they describe the dimensions and pleasures of dining out (remember when we did that?) and fit the bill as templates for the good life. "
By Jan Avgikos - December 2020
Stanya Kahn Reviewed in Frieze
"Stanya Kahn’s current outing at ICA Los Angeles consists of just three filmic works produced over a ten-year span. Anyone hoping to grapple with a greater breadth of the artist’s considerable output, will have to wait. That said, the curatorial choices here are pointed and vividly bring to life the artist’s core themes. Foremost among these is an abiding concern with the problem of language – that part of communication which structures human experience and renders it meaningful, yet by the same token can serve to limit, and even undermine existence as such. All three videos would seem to take their cue from an acute premonition of communication breakdown, which is seen to rebound, with mounting force, between continually marginalized human actants."
By Jan Tumlir - 17 November 2020
Rodney McMillian Featured in Mousse Magazine
"For Body Politic, his latest exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, McMillian continues working in an additive manner. The White House Painting, II (2018–20) is made from the physical remnants of the 2018 version, while works on paper such as An Abbreviated History in Abstraction (2019–20) reflect a history of violence against Black individuals, contextualized by writings such as Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid (2007)1 and Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body (2000)."
By Jennifer Piejko - November 2020
Rodney McMillian Reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail
"Rodney McMillian’s new show at Vielmetter Los Angeles, Body Politic, springs from such histories of the medical exploitation of Black people in the United States. His bright paintings and huge black sculptures of body parts, which together assess American Abstract Expressionism, are inspired by the groundbreaking work of scholars Dorothy Roberts and Harriet A. Washington. The former wrote about the eugenic controls of Black people and the latter authored the 2006 book Medical Apartheid, which sets forth the above story about Mr. Yeagin and also documents research conducted on Black prisoners."
By Yxta Maya Murray - November 2020
Stanya Kahn reviewed in Hyperallergic
"The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) presents a trio of Kahn’s films in the exhibition Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs, which runs through January. In addition to the world premiere of No Go Backs, curator Jamillah James complements the film with Stand in the Stream, filmed between 2011 and 2017, and It’s Cool, I’m Good (2010). The films capture Los Angeles throughout the last decade, a landscape that remains consistently familiar even as civil rights, climate change, and Kahn’s personal relationships rapidly evolve. "
By Renée Reizman - 3 November 2020
Rodney McMillian Reviewed in Hyperallergic
"Rodney McMillian’s Body Politic at Vielmetter Los Angeles builds on themes the artist has long engaged with: racial and socioeconomic injustice, and the relationship between politics and aesthetics.
The exhibition is comprised of collages with text and semi-abstract sculptures, as well as one wall-sized installation. McMillian’s strategies are not novel, but he has rigorously honed his craft. His grasp of nuance and light-handed approach coax viewers in before confronting them with the history of racism in the United States."
By Natalie Haddad - 30 October 2020
Stanya Kahn Featured in Bomb Magazine
"Stanya Kahn has always been politically engaged. Recently, on her Twitter and Instagram accounts, she has consistently posted and reshared vital information for people protesting police murder, brutality, and structural racism. Moreover, she and her son Lenny were out in the streets of LA protesting after the murder of George Floyd; and they, like many of the other protestors, were physically and mentally vulnerable in the face of a militarized police force. "
By William J. Simmons - 26 October 2020
Kennedy Yanko Interviewed in Surface Magazine
"A new family of salvaged metal sculptures celebrates the women who shaped her sensibilities. Here, the vanguard Brooklyn artist meditates on how her deeply personal work challenges our perceptions through sensation and contrast."
By Ryan Waddoups - 20 October 2020
Deborah Roberts in the New York Times
"“A Consequence of History,” a 2020 collage-and-text work by Deborah Roberts made exclusively for T and inspired by the art of Barbara Kruger. Both artists use found imagery in their work — though Roberts generally does not combine her images with text, as she does here in tribute to Kruger’s style. They also both attended Syracuse University, at different times. In an interview, Roberts said that in Kruger’s art, “There’s no room to not understand what she’s talking about.”
By Megan O'Grady - 19 October 2020
Kennedy Yanko Featured in Cultured
"Who is in for a couch conversation with Kennedy Yanko and Kimberly Drew? The former’s Vielmetter exhibition in Los Angeles, “Salient Queens,” is up now providing juicy fodder for a discussion surrounding a new body of work that deals in scrap metal and the juxtaposition of competing narratives. “After I pull metal and other materials from salvage yards, I sit with them in a formal dialogue. I have to understand their physical stance before I can comprehend their presence conceptually. In time, the objects’ stories reveal themselves to me. From there, I can begin to transition the material away from its previous circumstances and reposition its atomic particles (literally, and metaphorically) such that their compositions may be perceived differently and thus newly defined,” says Yanko. To accompany the opening of the exhibition, photographer Mike Vitelli captured Yanko in avant-garde fashion pieces surrounded by the work on view."
- 16 October 2020
Kim Dingle Reviewed in The New Yorker
"Checkerboard tiles, circular tables, soup bowls, and other interior details are transformed into ecstatically abstract elements under Dingle’s deft brush. In several paintings (including “Full Service,” above), unaccompanied toddlers are seen sharing a meal, suggesting an antic portrait of socially distanced dining and pandemic parenting."
By Andrea K. Scott - October 2020
Genevieve Gaignard Featured in Artsy
"One can easily understand Wall’s point upon seeing a piece like Disinfect Our Politics (2020), which includes an image from a vintage advertisement that features a blindfolded white man, who resembles a politician, centered between mirror images of Black women sporting face masks and cleaning spray against a backdrop resembling an inverted confederate flag.Something in the milk isn’t clean and the imagery of Black women cleaning it up speaks volumes, not just in relation to politics, but to corporate America and the home."
By Dominique Clayton - 13 October 2020
Amy Sillman Reviewed in the New York Times
"Many of the new paintings seem moderately askew, arranged around an axis maybe 10 degrees off-center. That’s a form of painterly organization she’s used in the past, though here the slant feels more like wobbling, careening. “I really believe in the politics of improvisation,” she says. “On its good side, it’s about contingency, emotions. Tightrope walking.”
By Jason Farago - 8 October 2020
Stanya Kahn at ICA LA
"This exhibition comprises three works by Kahn produced over the past ten years, including her latest short film, No Go Backs (2020), marking its Los Angeles debut. Together, these videos present an urgent reflection of our times, foregrounding global concerns such as climate change, racism, state power, and rebellion with the artist’s singular humor and embrace of experimental time and narrative."
Free drive-in screening October 7th, more info here.
Genevieve Gaignard Reviewed in Whitewall
"For the site-specific project, the artist looks at ideas of representation, media aesthetics, and domesticity in collage works made of vintage wallpaper and magazine clippings—like one reading “We Are More Than a Moment” in neon, and another featuring cutouts of women, flowers, and logos from an old issue of Life. Within the vitrines, visitors will find elements of photography and everyday objects like sunscreen, garden hoses, and flip-flops make up 3D installations that encouraging a closer look into Gaignard’s universe."
By Pearl Fontaine - 10 September 2020
Stanya Kahn "No Go Backs" Featured in BFI London Film Festival
"Two teenagers traverse a post-apocalyptic California in this tale of an inherited wasteland, unprepared resilience and compassion, which points to the beginnings of a new future."
Paul Mpagi Sepuya Reviewed in Artforum
"The cool, analytical postmodern tradition has been shot through with the warmth of naked bodies touching. Sepuya doesn’t simply include the camera in the image but rests it tenderly in the crook of his subject’s neck. He doesn’t just show the artist’s hand but places it gingerly on his subject’s back. The images allow the viewer to take pleasure in the surface as well as to look for meaning below it. The photograph’s soft lines and the visible smudging on the mirror add an almost paint-erly texture to a photographic print."
By Ashton Cooper - September 2020
Nicole Eisenman Featured in The Washington Post
"Eisenman has lately funneled much of their perversity into raucous sculptures that answer exactly to the tenor of our ghoulish, carnivalesque politics. But political life and social life are not exactly the same. There is a difference, for instance, between a rally, where people shout slogans, and a salon like Ariana’s, where people read, and listen, are witty and perverse, and expose their vulnerable inner lives, and where everybody is watching to see what happens next."
By Sebastian Smee - 19 August 2020
Stanya Kahn Reviewed in Another Gaze
"Throughout Kahn forms contemporary layers over historic land contestations: the boys travel by bikes instead of carts, northbound rather than along the southerly inroads formed by westward expansionism during the 19th century; they carry plastic water bottles that must be constantly replenished and skate the dusty half-pipe of the Los Angeles River over which surface waters scantly flow. Albeit subtly, ‘No Go Backs’ never loses sight of the fact that scarcity has been purposefully etched into this landscape."
By Gabriella Beckhurst - 20 August 2020
Susanne Vielmetter Interviewed in ArtNet News
"Los Angeles-based dealer Susanne Vielmetter started out with a simple idea for her business: reflect the culture that you see around you. With that in mind, she opened her gallery in 2000 with a diverse, gender-balanced stable of artists at a time when white male conceptual artists were dominating the West Coast scene.
Now, as she marks her 20th anniversary in the business, the world is catching up."
By Kate Brown - 6 August 2020
Pope L. Featured in Artforum
"Pope.L’s I-Machine (2014–20) has a handmade, provisional appearance that conveys a sense of a thing in a state of ongoing and perhaps hopeless becoming. The artist describes the work as a 'self-blinding contraption… self-blinding because its function is to encourage unknowledge or ignorance or, at best, reflection on ignorance and doubt. by encourage, i mean, when one is in the presence of this assembly, one should feel prodded toward opacity, uselessness, dumbness and incompleteness rather than transparency, smarty-pantsness and wholeness.'"
By Artforum - July 2020
Solo Exhibition: Deborah Roberts: I'M at The Contemporary Austin January 23 – August 15, 2021
The first solo Texas museum exhibition by Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts, featuring all new works.
Deborah Roberts (American, born 1962 in Austin, Texas) critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. Her first solo museum presentation in Texas, I'm, is part of The Contemporary Austin's participation in the Feminist Art Coalition, a nationwide initiative of art institutions to generate awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action through exhibitions and events.
Two Person Exhibition — Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee at The FLAG Art Foundation December 12, 2020 - March 13, 2021
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on the second venue of their 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation prize exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. In collaboration with Stephanie Roach and Jon Rider at FLAG, this second presentation is a 2-person exhibition featuring works by both Eisenman and Keith Boadwee!
For those who cannot visit the exhibition in New York, a link to tour the exhibition virtually can be found below.
20 Years Featured in the Los Angeles Times
"Vielmetter Los Angeles gallery is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a group show (open by appointment) that features works by artists who are represented by or have been shown in the gallery over the years. It’s a reunion that brings together work by important L.A. artists, including Edgar Arceneaux, Andrea Bowers, Math Bass, Liz Glynn, Shana Lutker, Kim Dingle, Steve Roden, Ruben Ochoa and the late Laura Aguilar.
Plus, there’s a must-see backroom installation by Sean Duffy, titled “Alone Now,” that feels just right for our era: an apocalyptic man cave that features all manner of assemblage and hacked-together machinery."
By Carolina Miranda - 24 July 2020
Wangechi Mutu featured in the New York Times
"The series of bronze statues by Wangechi Mutu that currently adorns the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade is scheduled to be on public display until early November. But two of the four pieces, “The Seated I” and “The Seated III,” will remain at the museum long after the exhibition closes as a part of its collections, the Met announced on Tuesday.
“Sometimes when you do a site-specific commission it only works for the specific site or in that particular context,” Max Hollein, the museum’s director, said in an interview. “In regard to Wangechi’s works, it’s clear that on the facade they work as these four sculptures framing the facade, transforming the facade, but they also work as singular objects.”
When they were unveiled last September, Ms. Mutu’s caryatid sculptures — traditionally female figures carved into architectural support structures like columns — were the first artworks to be presented from the face of the Met’s building on Fifth Avenue. In Ms. Mutu’s renderings, the figures are released from their supporting role. Instead of helping to hold up roofs or balconies, they sit freely on pedestals."
By Peter Libbey - 28 July 2020
Nicole Eisenman Reviewed in Sculpture
"Perhaps none of her efforts better demonstrates this than Procession (2019), a sculptural group made for one of the outdoor terraces of the Whitney Museum of American Art for last year’s Whitney Biennial and now on view in “Sturm und Drang,” a selection exploring the sculptural dimensions of Eisenman’s work in two and three dimensions from 1994 through 2019 at The Contemporary Austin (which came about when Eisenman won the newly combined 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize). Procession consists of figures that function individually but also together, lumbering in a procession—a parade, perhaps, or a protest. Eisenman had previously employed simple devices for arranging groups of figures: positioning them around a pool, for instance, in Fountain (2017), which was first seen at Skulptur Projekte Münster; an edition of that work now resides permanently at the Nasher Sculpture Center."
By Katy Diamond Hamer - 16 July 2020
Pope L. Featured in The New York Times
"This work is about our need for self-blinding and encourages reflection on our use, as a community, of unknowledge, misinformation and ignorance. The recent controversy regarding The New York Times allowing the printing of a hot topic Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton without proper vetting is a layered example. Who, in this scenario, is the most ignorant actor? The Cotton? NYT? Or us? Is it the Senator, because he recommends killing his own? Is it the “Tombs,” because they condoned his ignorance and then claimed they did not know what they were publishing? Or is it Us’n, myself included, because, well, it’s The Times, and they stand for us all? Well. Maybe they do not. Maybe they cannot. Maybe they have not. For a while now. And we, and we were too self-blinding to admit it?"
By Pope L. - 23 July 2020
Esther Pearl Watson in The New York Times
An artist captures 4 months of sidewalk chalk drawings. The next messages are yours for the making.
By Esther Pearl Watson - 19 July 2020
Pope L. Featured in Art in America
"JUST BEFORE NEW YORK issued its shelter-in-place order in March, I attended the closing of Pope.L’s exhibition “Choir” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Entertainment justice adopts a rhetoric of Black empowerment similar to that of the Black Arts Movement in the ’70s. But, as critic Aria Dean writes, Pope.L has reacted to that position over the course of his life as an artist, developing a “hole theory” that posits Blackness’s relationship to trauma as a powerful creative force."
By Taraneh Fazeli - 9 July 2020
Genevieve Gaignard Reviewed in the Santa Barbara Independent
"As it inspires a broad range of emotional responses — from desperate sadness to wry humor and joyful hope — Outside Looking In could not come at a better time, for Santa Barbara or for these oh-so-divided United States."
By Charles Donelan - 6 July 2020
Edgar Arceneaux Featured in ArtNet News
"Before he staged his rendition of the tragically misunderstood 1981 performance, Arceneaux spoke to Ben Vereen himself. “I was brought to tears during the call,” Arceneaux said, imagining how Vereen must have felt having his work so taken out of context. “I could sense from [Vereen] that, he knows there’s people out there that care now about what he tried to do 30 years ago. Maybe now is that time.”
By Caroline Goldstein - 9 July 2020
Deborah Roberts in Hyperallergic
"I learned to love Juneteenth long before I became aware of the emancipation of enslaved Black people. As an adult, I certainly understand the significance of this day and why it is vital that we celebrate and remember Juneteenth, particularly in light of current circumstances. My father is no longer with us, but I think of him fondly on this day and smile when I light my first charcoal briquette."
By Deborah Roberts - 21 June 2020
Genevieve Gaignard Featured in Vanity Fair
"“WTF AMERICA?” wrote the artist Genevieve Gaignard on Instagram on May 27, two days after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. With it she shared an image of her 2020 collage titled Fantasia, a piece that examines police brutality, innocence, and the white gaze.
“I was obviously angry,” said Gaignard, whose work blends mixed media, sculptures, domestic installations, and self-portraiture to explore race, beauty standards, consumption, identity, and accountability. When collaging, Gaignard—the daughter of a Black father and a white mother—focuses on Black strife and Black beauty by using images from old issues of Ebony, Jet, and Life magazines arranged over vintage wallpaper, a material she remembers from her childhood home in Orange, Massachusetts."
By Jessica Herndon - 17 June 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya Featured in Hyerpallergic
“It’s about receipts really,” Sepuya told Hyperallergic. “I’m not alone amongst black artists who want to see the receipts from non-Black curators, gallerists, museum directors who put up public-facing language in exhibitions about representation, justice, inclusion, diversity, whatever those words mean. I want to see receipts from non-Black collectors to know their interests in Black bodies aren’t salacious and that they are putting their money to defending Black lives.”
By Valentina Di Liscia - 3 June 2020
Susanne Vielmetter Featured in ART Das Kunstmagazin
Claudia Bodin features Susanne Vielmetter in the latest issue of ART Das Kunstmagazin.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya Featured in Harper's Magazine
When does imagination become appropriation?
By Richard Russo - May 2020
Andrea Bowers featured in the Bay Area Reporter
"It doesn't seem imaginable today, with travelers largely avoiding airports due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, but in a few years passengers departing flights through Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport may not be in such a rush to leave the aviation facility. Instead, they may just want to have an impromptu curbside dance party.
Their desire to turn the sidewalk into a dance floor will be inspired by seeing a series of disco balls greeting them overhead surrounded by an elaborate neon artwork lighting up inspirational quotes from Milk, the first LGBT icon to have an airport terminal named in their honor."
By Matthew S. Bajko - 20 May 2020
Andrea Bowers Exhibition Featured in Contemporary Art Daily
"'Environmental grief' describes mourning the loss of nature and its creatures. Coined as early as twenty years ago, the term describes the feeling of bereavement experienced by those who either witness or anticipate the loss of landscapes, plant or animal species, or entire ecosystems as a consequence of human-induced climate change and other intervention. The notion of environmental grief has circulated widely in recent years, steeped in evidence that the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event is already underway, that our global ecosystem is growing weaker and weaker and that the entire biosphere is being irreparably destroyed by human activity."
Stanya Kahn Reviewed in Art in America
"In fact, while a strong sense of nostalgia runs through No Go Backs, the longing does not appear to be for some vague return to nature. Flashbacks pepper the film: the boys skateboarding in a driveway, visiting a food truck. One of the protagonists is played by Kahn’s son, and in one flashback we see this character sitting in his bedroom, with a photo on the wall of Kahn holding him as a child. The film’s nostalgia, in the end, is for the world that we live in today, the one we seem determined to destroy."
By Travis Diehl - 14 May 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya 2019 Biennial Grant Recipient from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
"The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation revealed the 20 contemporary artists receiving its 2019 Biennial Grants, which come with an unrestricted $20,000 for each recipient. Past recipients of the prize are a veritable who’s-who of influential contemporary artists, and this year’s class is equally impressive."
By Benjamin Sutton - 12 May 2020
Gallery Platform LA Featured in Hyperallergic
"Galleries are seeing this project as an opportunity to pursue new ideas and directions. Luis De Jesus, for example, is “really excited to use it as an alternative space where we can do one-off projects with artists that we don’t represent.” The gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles said, “we are aiming to promote some of our younger LA-based artists to help keep the focus on supporting our local art scene.” Other galleries, like Shulamit Nazarian, plan to showcase artists who had exhibitions canceled or postponed due to COVID-19."
By Elisa Wouk Almino - 14 May 2020
Stanya Kahn and Paul Mpagi Sepuya Featured in ArtNews Pick of Online Programs
"The quarantine selfie is but the newest genre of self-portraiture to emerge in our contemporary age. In this moderated chat, Janine DeFeo, a teaching fellow at the Whitney, will explore how artists including Ana Mendieta, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Adrian Piper have used self-portraiture as a means for expression from the isolated spaces of their homes or studios. Attendees are encouraged to submit questions via the chat function."
–Katie White
"Multidisciplinary artist Stanya Kahn will discuss her latest short film, No Go Backs, with Wexner Center curators Lucy Zimmerman and Jennifer Lange in conjunction with the artist’s (now-paused) exhibition at the institution. The dreamlike, dialogue-free film—which is available for free online viewing through May 15 via Kahn’s dealer, Susanne Vielmetter—follows two teenagers as they leave behind a collapsing civilization to trek into the California wilderness, where they attempt to forge a new life with others they encounter along the way. Shot on 16mm film and scored by original music from artists including super-producer Brian Eno, the late emo-trap pioneer Lil Peep, and Kahn herself, No Go Backs bridges the faded past and the tenuous present in search of a better future."
—Tim Schneider
May 11
Louise Fishman Reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail
"The acute intimacy of the small paintings establishes an ironic distance from Abstract Expressionist heroics. Digitization focuses our gaze on their exposed ground and subjects Fishman’s methods to visual deconstruction. It is as though the viewer can revisit the self-scrutiny involved in her transition from stained grid paintings, like the 1971 Untitled, into gestural works that “came out of my own experience.” She harkens back to Cézanne and Soutine. Here, while the online format amplifies their context, it ultimately leaves out the works’ mute, material presence, so reliant on touch—an absence that adds poignancy to today’s enforced remoteness."
By Hearne Pardee - May 2020
Alexandro Segade in ArtForum
Alexandro Segade's "The Context: Distance" a special artist project commission is in the May issue of ArtForum. The four-page project coincides with the release of the artists graphic novel "The Context" published by Primary Information and now available for pre-order. "The Context: Distance" features the characters from Segade's graphic novel to illustrate the first 10 days of quarantine and social distancing in New York City.
Nicole Eisenman Featured in Vulture
"Artists Nicole Eisenman and Sam Roeck just launched a sticker pack on Apple, titled “Banandemic,” featuring anthropomorphic banana peels enacting COVID-related safety precautions, like wearing latex gloves and masks, bumping elbows with peel-arms, and washing their peel-hands while singing Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” “Bananas are just funny,” says Eisenman. “They’re funnier than, say, a peach. A peach is sexy, but it’s not funny; a pomegranate is mysterious, but it’s not humorous.” The stickers do more than lighten the mood during a difficult time: Each $2.99 purchase goes to The New York Community Trust’s NYC COVID-19 Response and Impact Fund, which offers aid to city-based nonprofits that provide health care, housing, and access to food for those in need."
By Hilary Reid - 23 April 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya Reviewed in The Guardian
"The work is laced with homoerotic visual culture, and pulls the curtain back – often literally – on the function of the studio. Tripods are often in shot, while orange peel, used coffee cups and Post-it notes add to the mise-en-scene. Black velvet backdrops and mirrors serve as a way to reflect images and bodies at surreal angles, with it often being hard to tell whose limbs belong to whom."
By Lanre Bakare - 28 April 2020
Nicole Eisenman Reviewed in Frieze
"For Eisenman, who is both gay and Jewish, historical memory sometimes works like a blunt instrument. Against the many crises her painting and sculpture insistently refer to – climate collapse, the imbroglio of electoral politics, the dilapidated conditions of migrancy – we receive, unequivocally and without restraint, the gamut of the artist’s own experience saturated with the calamity of our collective present."
By Shiv Kotecha - 28 April 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya Featured in Los Angeles Review of Books
"Sepuya takes back the prerogative of photographing bodies of color — but more than this: he invites us to reflect on the dynamics of the action of making photos as it has become increasingly democratized, or at least made capacious through a variety of mobile technologies."
By Jonathan Alexander - 14 April 2020
Rodney McMillian Reviewed in The New Yorker
"Throughout, McMillian makes canny formal use of the geometric patterning of the afghans; in their intimate, handcrafted aura, he finds a deft foil to the heroics of the abstract sublime, which he both celebrates and undermines."
By Johanna Fateman - April 2020
Rodney McMillian's Hanging With Clarence Reviewed by Riting
"The performance complicates the notion of an easy understanding and reading of history, race, and, thus, identity.
The discourse of identity politics presents race as a fixed entity, but how is it
that a category
that identity politics takes to be a fixed essence turns out to be so indeterminate?
Obviousness might be one feature of ideology:
there was no obviousness in Hanging with Clarence.
McMillian—who kept changing characters during the performance—
between the speech of a former civil rights movement activist who is today a conservative Associate Supreme Court Justice and, between songs like “Miss Lucifer’s Love” and others of his own composition,
McMillian as a writer, speaker, performer, singer."
By Philipp Farra and John Story - 15 April 2020
Nicole Eisenman and Mickalene Thomas Featured in The New York Times Magazine
"Queer culture and the arts would be much poorer without the presence and contribution of butch and stud lesbians, whose identity is both its own aesthetic and a defiant repudiation of the male gaze."
By Kerry Manders - 13 April 2020
Deborah Roberts Featured in the New York Times
"That resolve is finally paying off. At age 57, Ms. Roberts is about to have her first solo museum exhibition — a big deal for any artist, but especially gratifying for one who, four years ago, was working in a shoe store to pay the bills.
“She’s worked for so long without any institutional recognition,” said Hallie Ringle, the curator of contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art who helped organize "Fictions,” the 2017 show at the Studio Museum in Harlem that included Ms. Roberts. “What she hasn’t done, though, is let that stop her.”'
By Robin Pogrebin - 12 April 2020
Now available: Paul Mpagi Sepuya Monograph
Now available though our new online shop at shop.vielmetter.com is Paul Mpagi Sepuya's monograph recently published by Aperture and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on the occasion of his first major museum survey exhibition. The monograph includes an interview with the artist by curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi as well as contributions by Malik Gaines, Lucy Gallun, Ariel Goldberg, Evan Moffitt, and Grace Wales Bonner. Check it out by following the Link below.
Genevieve Gaignard in the Los Angeles Times
"The artist’s installations frequently explore issues of identity and belonging and often employ the signifiers of girls’ popular culture — black and white. (Gaignard is the daughter of a black father and white mother.) The installation above, titled "Be More" imagines a young woman’s bathroom cluttered with aspirational beauty products, many of which are toxic."
By Carolina Miranda - 11 April 2020
Susanne Vielmetter interviewed in Artillery
"Now that this virus has literally touched every aspect of our lives, as devastating as that is, we can have the freedom to think radically different and utopian thoughts. We can think of the gallery, and of the entire world, in completely new ways."
By Anna Bagirov - 9 April 2020
Arlene Shechet Reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail
"With an intense emphasis on color, the multi-tiered, often column-like structures achieve a fresh synthesis of painting and sculpture. This is more than it may at first seem: Shechet has long been interested in ideas from the West and the East—both Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist teaching—a practice that allows for the invention she excels at to encompass non-formal factors, or rather to integrate idea, desire, and process."
By David Rhodes - April 2020
Arlene Shechet Interviewed in Cultured
"I’m a walking craft show. It’s such a misunderstanding. What’s not crafted? Society gives craft all this meaning. I feel there is a spectrum in which we can celebrate making things with our hands, and that’s what we do as artists. I think address the issue head on: craft or art, what difference does it make? People have been arguing this forever. Honestly, one of the reasons I started using clay was because it was so marginalized and denigrated as an art material. I felt it had gigantic opportunities. If you work on the margins, it’s not crowded there."
By Jacoba Urist - 5 April 2020
Nicole Eisenman Reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail
"Sturm und Drang, a solo show from Nicole Eisenman that’s on view at The Contemporary Austin through August 16, features representative examples of her art. You’ll find a mix of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper ranging in size from a room-filling grouping to individual pieces you can hold in your hand. Almost everything is of recent vintage, with three exceptions dating from the 1990s. The exhibition celebrates the artist being a recipient of the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAGG Art Foundation prize. Based on what’s gathered here, Eisenman, 55, could have won this latest honor for her paintings or sculpture alone, or even just for her works on paper. From this sampling of her career, she emerges as a wily overachiever. No matter the medium, she excels. Besides her skill at making things, she forcefully expresses herself with aplomb, conviction, empathy, bravado, and a gift for visual storytelling."
By Phyllis Tuchman - April 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya Featured in Cultured
"The incognito images, ironically, compel you to come face to face with the subjects that stipple Sepuya’s life. His manner of disclosing who they are is intentionally as overt as it is subtle. “The thing that I’m intrigued about is intimacy. They are not anonymous if you know them,” the Los Angeles-based artist says, mentioning the familiarity of a tattoo, a gesture. “It is about positioning the viewer along that boundary of recognition or not knowing.”'
By Jonathan Kendall – 3 April 2020
Genevieve Gaignard Featured in Eleven 11 Magazine
"There is something wildly provocative and beautifully defiant about the work of LA-based artist Genevieve Gaignard. Whether it is posing in somewhat satirical photographic self-portraiture or composing mixed-media installations of contrasting realities, Genevieve's work explores race, class, and femininity with a humorous, pop appeal."
By Krystal Owens – March 2020
Stanya Kahn reviewed in Columbus Underground
"In what now looks like a very prescient work, Kahn offers a vaguely post-apocalyptic vision of Los Angeles and the mountains that surround it. It is a world without dialog and inhabited solely by teens and tweens. As the film unfolds a narrative of sorts takes shape. Backpacks are hastily packed. Two teenage boys traverse an urban landscape (whether they’re running from something or to something is never explained). As they continue their journey, the landscape slowly transforms from concrete to open grassland and then to an epic wilderness. Civilization eventually recedes and the earth’s natural landscape takes center stage."
By Jeff Regensburger – 23 March 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya interviewed in AnOther Man
"Peoples’ interest in identity and politics will come and go based on this regime or that, but if we can assert ourselves at the foundation of the medium whether or not they want it, we will be there."
By Amelia Abraham – 20 March 2020
Mickalene Thomas on the cover of TIME
“This work first and foremost celebrates her as a person that radiated self-pride, vivacity, glamour and fearlessness, but also recognizes her legacy as a face of resistance.”
By D.W. Pine – 05 March 2020
Whitney Bedford reviewed in Artillery
"The densely detailed, intensely chromatic landscape views in Reflections on the Anthropocene are political, semiotic, assertively symbolic and narrative works whose deliberate citations of art history serve as the structures on which to hang not only a discourse of aesthetic agency and modern styles but an incisive commentary on humanity’s oppressive, fetishized, destructive imperialism toward nature."
By Shana Nys Dambrot – March 2020
Liz Glynn reviewed in Artforum
"Is this the cruelest optimism of all? That we can forever amble happily toward the ever-receding horizon of progress? For a lucky few, the horizon no longer glimmers in the distance, and they make do in the dark. For most of us, the sun still winks from the great beyond, drawing us ever closer to the brink."
By Christina Catherine Martinez – March 2020
Edgar Arceneaux solo exhibition at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Edgar Arceneaux on his solo exhibition at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal (April 9–June 14, 2020), presenting two works by the artist: the video installation Until, Until, Until… (2015-2017) and the sculptural environment The Library of Black Lies (2016). Curated by Lesley Johnstone.
Arlene Shechet reviewed in Wallpaper
"The composition of elements and unusual pairing of materials feel as natural as a game of free association, yet belies a serious, technical hands-on mastering of casting, carving, firing and building – and each piece could cause a hernia to lift."
28 February 2020
Arlene Shechet interviewed in The New York Times Style Magazine
“Everybody wants to be able to tell a quick story, but I do not want to make something that fits into a few sentences. I don’t want it to have a punchline."
By Merrell Hambleton – 27 February 2020
Karl Haendel reviewed in ArtNowLA
"Haendel is a talented draftsman with a knack for realistically rendering just about any subject with a pencil."
By Jody Zellen – 26 February 2020
Nicole Eisenman solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on Sturm und Drang, a solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin–Jones Center and The Contemporary Austin–Laguna Gloria (February 27–August, 16 2020).
Encompassing a wide range of media including drawing, painting, and sculpture, this exhibition focuses on the artist’s anti-monumental and enigmatic three-dimensional work, and will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue.
Genevieve Gaignard featured in the Los Angeles Times
"And in a time where black art is being celebrated, Gaignard emphasized that 'we’re more than just a moment. We’re actually completing the dialogue or the conversation because we’ve been excluded for so long. It’s hard for the majority to process that. We have to make very straightforward statements sometimes.'"
By Makeda Easter – 14 February 2020
John Sonsini interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition
"In the current climate, people sometimes see themes of immigration in Sonsini's work. Men leaving home — working hard for money to send back to their families, separation for sustenance. Sonsini denies it. His art, he says, is not political."
By Susan Stamberg – 13 February 2020
April Street reviewed in Carla
"The themes of brittle purity and frustrating unknowability are paralleled in Street's budding fruit and blooming natural forms which picture an impossibly beguiling, constantly renewing landscape, never quite in focus."
By Aaron Horst – 12 February 2020
Susanne Vielmetter featured in The Art Newspaper
“Let’s put it this way: the biggest chunk of wealth is still owned by men. That’s why most big galleries don’t represent more female artists: money is still in the hands of men.”
By Margaret Carrigan – 11 February 2020
Rodney McMillian reviewed in Artforum
"Brown fabric is draped over the walls at the Underground Museum for Rodney McMillian’s exhibition “Brown: Videos from the Black Show,” rendering the interior melancholic and enigmatic."
By Taylor Renee Aldridge – February 2020
Whitney Bedford highlighted in artnet
"As the art world turns its eyes to the West Coast for the second edition of Frieze Los Angeles—held at Paramount Pictures Studios, February 13–16—make sure to save some time after the fair for these shows across the city.
Drawing on the history of “view paintings” made by artists before the dawn of photography, Whitney Bedford’s “Veduta” series aim to illustrate the effects that mankind has had on the natural landscape. It’s a savvy way of using art history to underscore the unavoidable reality of climate change."
By Sarah Cascone – 10 February 2020
Karl Haendel reviewed in Hyperallergic
"What we see is both a portrait of the Los Angeles art scene and of Haendel: who interests him, whose company he’s keeping, and what his artistic priorities are."
By Jennifer Remenchik – 05 February 2020
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley Named Visiting Professors at University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley on their appointment as the Keith L. and Kathy Sachs Visiting Professors in the Department of Fine Arts for the 2019 – 2020 Academic Year at The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Mary and Pat will work with graduate students and will give a public lecture at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Spring 2020.
John Sonsini reviewed in the Los Angeles Times
"I think John Sonsini may be the greatest portrait painter in the country.
That’s because his pictures of working-class men capture essential aspects of their individuality while revealing essential things about the world in which we live.
Sonsini’s portraits raise profound questions about identity — race, class, sexuality — while laying bare the cultural, economic and political underpinnings of the ways we see ourselves, especially as those visions take shape in relationship to others: people with different backgrounds, different upbringings, different dreams."
By David Pagel – 30 January 2020
Sadie Benning at the Wexner Center for the Arts
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Sadie Benning on their solo exhibition Pain Thing (February 1 - April 26, 2020), curated by Curator-at-Large Bill Horrigan. The exhibition is a single installation consisting of 63 small wood panels grouped into 19 discrete and separately titled sequences that extend through three galleries.
Stanya Kahn at the Wexner Center for the Arts
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Stanya Kahn on her solo exhibition No Go Backs at the Wexner Center for the Arts (January 22 - April 26, 2020), curated by Associate Curator of Exhibitions Lucy I. Zimmerman. The exhibition premieres the artist's video No Go Backs, an intensely visceral, highly compressed work that begins by following two teens, immersing viewers in fragments of their journey.
John Sonsini reviewed in Riot Material
"Sonsini has painted these same men over and over for the past fifty years, and one has the sense they comprehend and appreciate each other deeply. These are not only paintings but images that facilitate a deeply personal exchange between people whose experiences may be very different, but whose humanity is very much the same."
By Eve Wood – 20 January 2020
Pope.L reviewed in the New York Times
"The stealth magic and gonzo tactics in these works invoke people who succeeded in some of the horrific historical narratives: captives who sneaked off slave ships; runaways and maroons; people who acted like ghosts to achieve their own freedom."
By Martha Schwendener – 10 January 2020
Wangechi Mutu featured in the Financial Times
"From Artemisia Gentileschi to Wangechi Mutu, 2019 was a year in which women artists broke through the male canon"
By Jackie Wullschläger – 03 January 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya interviewed by the Modern Art Notes Podcast
"Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs of himself, his friends and his colleagues advance portraiture through layering, fragmentation, confusion and a certain kind of trompe l’oeil. They make us question what we see, how it’s constructed, and encourage us to contemplate the relationship between reality and artifice."
By Tyler Green – 02 January 2020
Tobias Vielmetter-Diekmann Joins Vielmetter Los Angeles in New Full Time Position as Senior Director of Development and Technology
We are happy to announce that Berlin based Tobias Vielmetter-Diekmann has moved to Los Angeles to join Vielmetter Los Angeles as Senior Director of Development and Technology. Tobias joins the team of Senior Directors Kevin Scholl, Ariel Pittman, and Michael Smoler.
Technology has been an important driver in the gallery’s development from the beginning and Tobias’ role will be to further advance the gallery’s operations by utilizing cutting-edge technological solutions. This will include enhancing our state-of-the-art data management and communications systems, optimizing the gallery’s internal workflow and its digital presence for years to come and thus creating substantial benefits for the gallery’s clients and artists represented.
Most recently, Tobias collaborated with Berlin-based strategic consultant and UX designer Konstantin Haubrok (https://haubrok.co) to redesign the gallery’s brand identity and communication for social media, online platforms and print publications. For the gallery’s move to the new downtown location, they developed a new layout for the gallery webpage, which delivers access from mobile devices and a greatly enhanced opportunity to explore the gallery’s programming, exhibitions, news, and portfolios of artists.
Tobias has been part of the team since the founding of the gallery in 2000, up to now working remotely from Berlin in various capacities including the directorship of the gallery’s former Berlin branch. He developed the gallery’s integrated inventory and address management system and has managed its online presence from the beginning. Tobias has also helped gallery artists with ambitious technology-based productions for exhibitions both at the gallery and in major institutions as well as implementing advanced studio archiving solutions and data management.
Tobias holds a degree in software engineering in addition to a BA in Museum Studies from Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin with graduate studies in Art and Visual History at Humboldt University of Berlin. He has worked as Director at Praz-Delavallade Gallery, Berlin, and assisted the Curator’s Office of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Tobias is the founder of the inventory and contact management software WrkLst (https://wrklst.art), which offers cloud based integrated data management solutions for commercial galleries, artists, collectors, and museums and is being used by a wide range of private and institutional customers worldwide.
Mickalene Thomas featured in Artsy
"This decade put the spotlight on celebrated artists such as Mickalene Thomas, whose unapologetic, “proud black lesbian” gaze has not only given visibility to the women in her life, but has also drawn attention to the way history has removed the presence and importance of black figures in painting."
By Charlotte Jansen – 18 December 2019
Amy Sillman highlighted in Vulture
"As the Museum of Modern Art toyed with removing the stick of modernism from its own keister, artist Amy Sillman went whole hog with the best single gallery of art that didn’t follow modernist strictures, showing the mother ship the jolt possible when you let go of old ideas."
By Jerry Saltz – 12 December 2019
Pope.L highlighted in The Art Newspaper
"A pirate wench with the head of Martin Luther King Jr hangs upside-down from the ceiling, her bosom partially exposed, on the stand of Mitchell-Innes & Nash at Art Basel in Miami Beach. The ghostly figure also leaks a chocolate substance mixed with the paint thinner Floetrol. Altogether, the statue A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and So On (2007), by the artist Pope.L, is a comment on the toxicity of black stereotypes."
07 December 2019
Mickalene Thomas reviewed in Artsy
"As she shares the spotlight with her friends and peers, Thomas promotes a vision of artmaking that relishes in solidarity and collaboration instead of tired notions of the single lone genius, toiling away in the studio to his sole benefit."
By Alina Cohen – 06 December 2019
Amy Sillman highlighted in the New York Times
"Titled The Shape of Shape, it was chosen by the New York painter Amy Sillman, who orchestrated a dense installation that compared and contrasted work by around 70 artists. The result was a visual feast that might also be read as a reminder to MoMA’s brainy curators that pleasure is its own form of knowledge."
By Roberta Smith – 06 December 2019
Pope.L reviewed in 4Columns
"Despite his unassuming abjection, or maybe because of the tenacity of similar abjection in our culture, and the fact that he has persistently thrown his arte povera in the face of a market obsessed with luxe surfaces, he has bitten off a huge chunk of gallery reality this fall."
By James Hannaham – 06 December 2019
Linda Besemer reviewed in What's On Los Angeles
"That their point of departure is a glitch reiterates this impossibility and makes the paintings even more fascinating to behold."
By Jody Zellen – 05 December 2019
Amy Sillman highlighted by Nicole Eisenman in Artforum
"Sillman’s eye is sharp and witty. She makes brilliant, often hilarious connections between objects that may be wildly disparate. As part of the opening gambit at the new MoMA, Sillman chose seventy-one works from the institution’s collection, using shape as her conceptual lodestar. Walk around the small, anxiously stuffed gallery and you will recognize aspects of Sillman’s own work: lumps, lines, cuts, and lots of awkward, bulbous things."
By Nicole Eisenman – December 2019
Mickalene Thomas named the 2020 Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts, Yale School of Art
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Mickalene Thomas on her appointment as the 2020 Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts at the Yale School of Art.
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean Marta Kuzma notes: “We are honored to have Mickalene Thomas join the Yale School of Art faculty throughout 2020 as a black feminist artist whose practice contributes to the evolving conversation around post-blackness, sexuality and power. She is a fierce mentor who has supported emerging queer black artists, through fostering critical conversations and assisting with professional development.”
Wangechi Mutu reviewed in the Financial Times
"Her work has long been preoccupied with hybrid female figures, from eerie tree women made out of earth, bone and other natural materials to her collages, which splice magazines and images from pop culture to combine images of female beauty with ones of horror, distortion and violence."
By Annalisa Quinn – 04 December 2019
Genevieve Gaignard at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Genevieve Gaignard on Bloom Projects: Genevieve Gaignard, Outside Looking In, a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (March 5–May 31, 2020). This exhibition is curated by Alexandra Terry, Associate Curator, MCASB.
Wangechi Mutu highlighted in Artforum
"Mutu’s installation ushers in a new era of cultural connectivity for the Met, one that I hope will inspire greater diversity and inclusion in its future offerings."
By Naimi J. Keith – December 2019
Nicole Eisenman featured in ArtNews
"Having long been known best as a painter, Nicole Eisenman has recently become one of our finest sculptors. Her characteristically playful five-part sculpture Sketch for a Fountain, which was first presented at the Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017, is an ode to leisure and quiet contemplation."
By Claire Selvin – 28 November 2019
Hayv Kahraman profiled on NPR
"She says her artwork is semi-autobiographical: large-scale paintings and sculptures focused on women, migrants and refugees, with references to the Italian Renaissance, Iraqi architectural design and Japanese woodcuts. Most of her work uses repeating images of women."
By Mandalit Del Barco – 3 December 2019
Genevieve Gaignard featured in Fortune magazine
"Genevieve Gaignard, who currently resides in an artist compound in Leimert Park, explores race, class, and femininity through her works. Her wallpaper installation ascends from the sixth to seventh floor and is called “Never Too Much,” a title borrowed from her favorite Luther Vandross tune."
By Danielle Barnabe – 24 November 2019
Pope.L profiled in Art in America
"Pope.L’s ambivalence toward form, his creation of works that generate multiple versions and embodiments that elude art historical classification, is his way of slipping past barriers that divide art and life."
By Aria Dean – 20 November 2019
Mickalene Thomas previewed in the New York Times
"Few artists have had more museum exposure in the past couple of years than Mickalene Thomas, a prolific maker in several media. In 2018 alone, her name was in the title of at least four different shows, and since then her work has been included in many other exhibitions across the country."
By Ted Loos – 24 November 2019
Linda Besemer in Artillery magazine
"Color and black-and-white are employed with equal evocativeness; oddly, you can imagine yourself inside several of the paintings, almost as though they portrayed actual spaces."
By Annabel Osberg – 20 November 2019
Mickalene Thomas featured in the Los Angeles Times
"When Mickalene Thomas was chosen to create art for the Leimert Park station of Metro’s Crenshaw/LAX line, she looked to iconic elements of the community’s landscape — including the Art Deco-era tower of what is now the Vision Theatre — then collaged them. She wanted residents to recognize the images in the piece."
By Dorany Pineda – 11 November 2019
Louise Fishman reviewed in the Los Angeles Times
"The vigor of her practice is formidable. The intensity and surprise of each painting simply don’t diminish."
By Leah Ollman – 22 October 2019
Amy Sillman interviewed in Artforum
"I wanted viewers to love this modern art in all its weird variety, and to know how it might be deeply linked to the feeling of disaster that so many of us have right now."
By Zack Hatfield – 21 October 2019
Pope.L featured in Frieze magazine
"Since the late 1970s, Pope.L has worked in performance, video, drawing, installation, sculpture and teaching, troubling facile readings of the machinations that govern the relationships between race, labour, capitalism and materiality. His practice traverses genres in an attempt to reckon with everything from the tenuousness of Black masculinity in public space to the lingering economic effects of post-industrial America."
By Jessica Lynne – 20 October 2019
Shana Lutker reviewed in Frieze magazine
By Jonathan Griffin – 09 October 2019
Kim Dingle reviewed in X-TRA
"It’s also what makes Dingle’s work so fascinating; paradoxically fun and fatal, her paintings evoke girlish frivolity while imagining genuine brutality and total anarchic destruction."
By Claudia Ross – Fall 2019
Nick Aguayo reviewed in the Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles
"Aguayo’s visual lexicon works because he productively stymies the logic of his own forms and colors before they reach a formulaic point of exhaustion by throwing in red herrings—as with the yellow arches or surprise pops of color painted onto the sides of the raw canvases. The revelation of process, the “editing” of the image made visible, eschews the self-assured heroism of the old guard of abstract painting while upholding doubt as the necessary catalyst of—perhaps the true subject of—experimentation."
By Kathryn Poindexter-Akers – 02 October 2019
Ruben Ochoa public sculpture at the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry
Ruben Ochoa is one of five artists selected for the U.S. General Services Administration's Art in Architecture public art program at the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry at the US/Mexican border.
Ochoa’s work entitled “Mis Marcadores” takes its name and inspiration from conchas, a type of Mexican sweet bread (pan dulce) and the bread stamp, or “marcador”, that is used to create the bread’s signature crunchy shell-like pattern. Pan dulce has a special place in Mexico’s gastronomic landscape and is commonly enjoyed as an everyday breakfast snack (akin to doughnuts) and during the observance of special occasions such as the Day of the Dead.
Rodney McMillian at The Underground Museum
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Rodney McMillian on Brown: Videos from The Black Show, a solo exhibition at The Underground Museum (October 5, 2019–February 16, 2020). The exhibition is comprised of video works presented in the artist's major exhibition The Black Show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2016).
Opening night will feature a performance by jazz musician, Alice Smith and a DJ set by Novena Carmel. The event is free and open to the public.
Nicole Eisenman profiled in artnet
"Eisenman has become a two-sport threat, a phrase associated with the unusual athletes who excel in, say, both baseball and football, like Deion Sanders. In the entertainment world, singer/songwriters are fairly common, but painter/sculptors are very rare entities."
By Phyllis Tuchman – 01 October 2019
Pope.L interviewed by Coco Fusco for Art Basel
"The motive is the same – to create a certain kind of willfulness that does not explain itself. Sometimes this is in honor of homelessness, sometimes its opaqueness is left where it resides. Each crawl, solo or group, is a challenge in a number of ways, not just physically."
By Coco Fusco – 24 September 2019
Pope.L reviewed in the New York Times
"The arduous, rebellious, absurdist spectacle was the largest group performance orchestrated by Mr. Pope.L, the Chicago-based veteran of more than 30 international “crawls” over the last four decades. He has used this willful gesture of vulnerability to explore race, class and power."
By Hilarie M. Sheets – 22 September 2019
Hayv Kahraman billboard for Expo Chicago
Hayv Kahraman is one of fifteen artists selected to participate in OVERRIDE | A Billboard Project, a citywide public art initiative presented by EXPO CHICAGO and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), displayed throughout Chicago’s City Digital Network (CDN). Kahraman's work will be projected through September 29.
Pope.L reviewed in Cultured magazine
"Known in part for its logistical challenges and athletic intensity, this solo performance, along with other early crawls, was meant to draw attention to the conditions of have-not-ness, homelessness, the forced surrender of verticality, the danger of proximity to the street and the potentially suspect movement of blackness/maleness in public space."
By Mandy Harris Williams – 20 September 2019
Pope.L previewed in Forbes
"Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, an ambitious triumvirate of exhibitions by the Public Art Fund, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, erupts Saturday with Conquest, his biggest group performance, involving some 140 to 160 people representing the city’s diversity in every manner from race and socioeconomics to range of mobility."
By Natasha Gural – 19 September 2019
Shana Lutker in CURRENT: LA FOOD
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Shana Lutker on her installation in this year's CURRENT: LA, Los Angeles' public art triennial (October 5–November 3, 2019), themed "Food." Titled "Contemporary Museum of Temporary Containers (CMTC)" and located at Valley Plaza Recreation Center in North Hollywood, the installation is composed of single-use takeout containers painted a single color and organized by size, shape, or former contents. The work encourages creative reuse and considers the limits of sustainability and recycling at a critical juncture of environmental responsibility.
Wangechi Mutu previewed in the New York Times
"Inaugurating what will be an annual commission for the Met’s facade, Ms. Mutu is placing bronze statues of seated women in four of the niches, from Sept. 9 through Jan. 12. Crowned, blinded and gagged by highly polished discs, and born of traditions both European and African, these graceful, commanding figures will change the face of the museum, literally and figuratively. As a test run suggests, they will sometimes reflect sunlight with spooky intensity, in what Ms. Mutu calls “a stunning message from beyond.” It is testament to her belief that, like street theater or religious rituals, art can nudge viewers toward congregation."
By Nancy Princenthal – 05 September 2019
Genevieve Gaignard reviewed in Artillery magazine
"It is not Genevieve Gaignard’s brazen truths, stinging though they are, but her subtle pricks that linger worryingly— Remember This House (2019) places a portrait of Ava Gardner (as well as other pale relations) on a family photo shelf, and a stuffed German Shepherd dutifully standing guard by the patriarch’s chair—contempt and violence neatly wrapped then delivered to your door."
By Max King Cap – 03 September 2019
Wangechi Mutu previewed in the New Yorker
"For the first time since the Met opened its Beaux-Arts building on Fifth Avenue, in 1902, works of art will grace the niches of its exterior. On Sept. 9, the museum inaugurates its Façade Commission with a quartet of seven-foot-high bronzes by the Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu (pictured), who divides her time between Nairobi and New York City. The female figures are reminiscent of caryatids, seen in both ancient Greek temples and in the centuries-old carvings of the Luba people from Central Africa."
30 August 2019
Wangechi Mutu previewed in W magazine
"Four six-and-a-half-to-seven-foot-tall bronze female figures—part African queens, part cyborgs—will take up position in the building’s exterior niches facing Fifth Avenue that have stood empty for more than 100 years. The sculptures are the work of the Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, and this homecoming, if you can call it that, carries all manner of poignant historical, political, and redemptive narratives along with it. An institution founded on the appropriation of antiquities and a Eurocentric view of culture is being turned on its head."
By Eve MacSweeney – 27 August 2019
Liz Glynn commission for the San Francisco Arts Commission
Commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission, Liz Glynn presents a permanent public art installation "Terra-Techne" located at Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at the San Francisco International Airport.
"Terra-Techne" is intended as a monument to technological innovation and organic connectivity. The artwork consists of six suspended “tectonic plates”, each representing a different continent, from which an upside-down landscape projects from the underside of the continents while an abstract circuit board extrusion sits on the top.
Nicole Eisenman in the Whitney Biennial reviewed in X-TRA
"I only took four photos during my visit to the Biennial. The above was one of them. This square wheel, part of Nicole Eisenman’s teargas-fart parade (Procession, 2019), was the best and most important thing in the entire show."
By Aria Dean – 18 August 2019
Mary Kelly at the Weatherspoon Museum of Art
Mary Kelly: Selected Works, a solo exhibition by Mary Kelly, opens at the Weatherspoon Art Museum (WAM) in Greensboro, NC on September 28, 2019 and will remain on view through December 8, 2019. Kelly is currently a Falk Visiting Artist at WAM. This exhibition is organized by Dr. Emily Stamey, Curator of Exhibitions.
For more information, please visit the museum's website.
Steve Roden reviewed in the Los Angeles Times
"Composers and painters often borrow from one another, but rarely are they the same person.
Steve Roden is one of those impressive oddities. New work at Vielmetter Los Angeles once again shows how captivating that rarity can be."
By Christopher Knight – 17 August 2019
Wangechi Mutu commission for The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Genevieve Gaignard profiled in LA Weekly
"Working at the intersection of race, gender, identity, memory, and popular culture, Gaignard’s work tackles broad social dynamics through the intimate lens of personal experience. As a mixed-race woman, she was and remains deeply affected by a feeling of invisible in-betweenness, and has been motivated by the desire to explore, explicate, and extrapolate from her own experiences some larger truths about the American experiment."
By Shana Nys Drambot - 16 August 2019
Samuel Levi Jones reviewed in the Los Angeles Times
"Jones operates according to an unstated social-scientific law, that power is neither created nor destroyed. He does the work of transformation, reassigning power from sources steeped in biased convention, where it had a corrosive effect on humanity, to new vehicles of thought and sensual encounter. Defiance has rarely looked this handsome."
By Leah Ollman – 11 August 2019
Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley reviewed in Mousse Magazine
"Indeed, one the most disorienting and successful aspects of the exhibition is that by entering the space we immediately become part of a scene. Surrounded by these familiar-unfamiliar anthropomorphic creatures imploring us that “getting emotional waste out of your gym bag is a nightmare of cognition,” we uncomfortably recognize ourselves as players. Following the cue of the cento, whereby the “higher,” authoritative source is subverted through collage, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley wear our subconscious social tyrannies as drag and push them to the point of pantomime, giving us the distance to realize their problematics, then perhaps even the space to laugh at them. Much like an actor realizing that he is not truly Macbeth but merely imitating his words and actions, perhaps a way of discovering ourselves in this overloaded haze of information is to embrace the fact that we are merely playing the roles we’re given. Underneath it all we are fragmented, uncertain, and human."
By India Nielson – 08 August 2019
Steve Roden reviewed in ArtNowLA
"Watching Roden construct these collages on the fly is fascinating and offers insight into his process and multi-faceted practice. Numerous times, I wanted to stop the projection to sit longer with his compelling combinations. What is magical about Roden’s exhibitions is not only the power of his painted compositions, but how the myriad elements fit together creating a unified whole."
By Jody Zellen – 08 August 2019
Genevieve Gaignard reviewed in Art & Cake blog
"In the engaging photography, collage, assemblage, and sculptural installation work of Genevieve Gaignard, anything and everything can be a self-portrait. This frequently includes actual self-portraiture but also expands to appropriate and transform arrayed objects of domestic and cultural spaces and images culled from popular media into reflections and embodiments of something both intimate and universal in the life of the artist. Empathetic vignettes for wall, nook, and floor space, in presenting heightened-reality versions of ordinary environments, convincingly evoke what could be read as not only archetypal but also as believably the artist’s own memories."
By Shana Nys Dambrot – 07 August 2019
Ruben Ochoa in the Wall Street Journal
"Ruben Ochoa’s photographs of ficus-tree roots breaking through the sidewalks of his childhood Los Angeles neighborhood reflect the tug of war between nature and urban construction, as well as the disparities of wealth and class that leave these broken pavements unrepaired."
By Susan Delson – 26 July 2019
Steve Roden reviewed in Artforum
"Roden’s bigger canvases, filled with prismatic slivers of color, evoke the stained-glass windows of a cathedral; yellow-ocher passages toward the tops of two of the paintings, both titled in and in and up and down below (above), 2019, enliven the mostly purplish color palette with a burst of divine light."
By Natalie Haddad – 26 July 2019
Pope.L performance with Public Art Fund
On September 21, Public Art Fund will present Conquest, Pope.L’s largest group performance to date. Inspired by the artist’s iconic crawls in which he dragged his body across the urban landscape, Conquest will navigate the streets of Downtown Manhattan continuing the irreverent tradition of his more than 30 performative works that have taken place since 1978. In this iteration, a group of 100+ volunteer participants that reflect the cultural and demographic diversity of New York City will crawl in relay a nearly 1.5 mile-long route from the well-to-do West Village to the new granite steps of Union Square via the triumphal arch of Washington Square Park. In choosing to give up their physical privilege, participants satirize their own social and political advantage, creating a comic scene of struggle and vulnerability to share with the entire community. Public Art Fund's presentation will be the artist’s most ambitious yet, putting on full display the power and contradictions of collective expression.
Conquest is the free, outdoor component of Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration – a trio of complementary exhibitions organized by Public Art Fund, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Addressing the artist’s boundary-breaking practice, the three-institution season of Pope.L’s work utilizes both public and private spaces, and will address issues and themes ranging from language and gender, to race, social struggle, and community.
Pope.L: Conquest is curated by Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator Nicholas Baume, with Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Katerina Stathopoulou.
Mickalene Thomas in CBS Morning News
"At her Brooklyn studio, Thomas explained to correspondent Nancy Giles it's that validation – demanding to be seen – that is part of what Manet intended by including his black model in Olympia: "It's about them looking out at you, and demanding to be seen, demanding the validation – Look at me, I'm here, I exist, I'm present."
By Kay Lim – 14 July 2019
Ellen Berkenblit interview in Juxtapoz Magazine
"I think my paintings emerge through color. They emerge through a few different things, but significantly through the language of color and what is happening at the moment on the palette. The colors are almost the domino effect of going through a painting. One leads to the next, edges between colors interact in a way that inspires me onto the next passage or mixing of colors. I spend a lot of time mixing colors on my palette before I even put them on the surface. Mixing is a constant throughout the process, the jumble of ideas that flow through color affects my relationship to them, and how they react with each other, and that always surprises me. They don't do one thing. They're full of surprises."
By Kristin Farr – July 2019
Vielmetter Los Angeles is expanding downtown!
With the opening of two additional exhibition spaces in our downtown location, Vielmetter Los Angeles is expanding the gallery in downtown Los Angeles to 24,000 sqf of exhibition space. We are closing the Culver City space as of July 6 and will be open by appointment until July 30.
Please note our new address and phone number below:
1700 S. Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90021
+1 213 623 3280
Our next opening will take place on Saturday, July 13, with a solo exhibition of Steve Roden’s work at the downtown gallery.
Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley at Studio Voltaire
Commissioned by Studio Voltaire, Rand/Goop (July 5–October 6) is a new large-scale installation at Studio Voltaire by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley and marks the artists’ first institutional exhibition in London.
In Rand/Goop, the artists have created a circular narrative for six totemic video sculptures. The protagonists, all performed by Reid Kelley, speak in pithy and often capricious four–line cento poems. The contents are drawn entirely from two sources. Appraisals of Russian–American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand’s ‘Objectivism’ philosophies – limited only to evangelist scholars of her work – are spliced with titles of articles listed on the website of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle, beauty and wellness brand Goop.
Deborah Roberts reviewed in Artforum
"For this exhibition, Roberts has created amalgamated images of children, combining found photographs with painted details and flat planes of color."
By Philomena Epps – July 2019
Pope.L featured in The Observer
"This fall, Manhattan’s most prestigious contemporary art spaces unite to celebrate the career-to-date of the renowned (and underappreciated) artist known as Pope.L.
Beginning October 10, each venue––MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Public Art Fund––will simultaneously host one component of an exhibition titled “Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration.” The show, collectively, is a mid-career retrospective that connects the artist’s past (especially his incendiary interventions known as crawls, which literally feature the artist crawling along the ground) with two new commissions."
By Clayton Schuster – 25 July 2019
Deborah Roberts profiled in Elephant Magazine
"Now in her late fifties, Roberts clearly feels a sense of responsibility towards the next generation. As someone who creates images, she is engaged with how black boys have been represented. Works in the exhibition such as After Stephen, Ulysses and Give It a Try analyse the way damaging stereotypes created by the media are internalized by youths."
By Charlotte Jansen – 25 June 2019
Sadie Benning, Nicole Eisenman, Rodney McMillian, Pope.L, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya at MOCA LA
Sadie Benning, Nicole Eisenman, Rodney McMillian, Pope.L, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are included in the exhibition The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA's Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles (May 19, 2019 - Jan 27, 2020). The exhibition is organized by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Raffi Kalenderian reviewed in It's Nice That
"Portraiture has, since, remained at the heart of Raffi’s practice. However, far from traditional portrait painting techniques that situate the subject against a plain and unobtrusive background, his approach delights in the embellishment and ornamentation of every aspect of the painting, incorporating elements like huge, vibrant hothouse plants and swirling patterns. As he says: 'My paintings are generally known for their texture and materiality. Variation and experimental paint handling are a huge part of the process. Often there is some form of vivacious patterning, in the form of clothes or wood grain or plants, or maybe all three.'"
By Rebecca Irvin – 07 June 2019
Nicole Eisenman reviewed in The Art Newspaper
"Nicole Eisenman’s first permanent public work of art has been unveiled in Boston. The installation Grouping of Works from Fountain (2017-19) was unveiled last weekend in the city’s new one-acre 401 Park as part of a redevelopment project in the Fenway area."
By Aimee Dawson – 07 June 2019
Nicole Eisenman reviewed in Forbes
"Grouping of Works from Fountain reunites Eisenman with Boston. She spent the summer of 1985 in the city, much of that time in the Fenway area where her installation now resides."
By Chad Scott – 06 June 2019
Deborah Roberts reviewed in Riot Material
"Roberts approaches collage with the compositional skills and strong opticality of a trained painter who first learned to draw hands and feet as a child by studying paintings by da Vinci and Michelangelo in her family bible. Her visually intense works are constructed in a devotional way that resonates with the viewer in ways similar to religious masterpieces because she felt called to create them. This politically powerful exhibition is not easy to contemplate, nor should it be, because the source content is so disturbing."
By Lita Barrie – 05 June 2019
Amy Sillman at The Arts Club of Chicago
Featuring new and recent painting, Amy Sillman's first institutional exhibition in Chicago, Amy Sillman: The Nervous System (May 22–August 3, 2019) at The Arts Club of Chicago calls upon abstract and figurative motifs to address the material and emotional conditions of being human in fraught political times.
Raffi Kalenderian reviewed in Studio International
"One of the ways I think about portraiture is that the whole painting is the portrait: the room, the clothes, the plants. Whatever it is, I try to paint the whole painting with a certain intensity, which then bounces back into the figure in the portrait.”
By Anna McNay – 04 June 2019
Wangechi Mutu in the Whitney Biennial reviewed in the Financial Times
"Wangechi Mutu’s seductive and cryptic Sentinels draw themes from a lifetime of collages and translate them into three dimensions. "
By Ariella Budick – 04 June 2019
Nicole Eisenman in the Whitney Biennial reviewed in The Financial Times
"The show reaches its apotheosis outdoors, where Nicole Eisenman’s wild Procession struggles on, rain or shine. One huge, dark-skinned man hauls another, who prostrates himself on the bed of a square-wheeled wagon. A cymbal player rides on the back of a crawling slave. More humanoid figures trail behind, sprouting strange growths, effusions, ropes and sticks — a parade of the malformed but dogged. There’s something oddly hopeful about this shambling spectacle, a sense that the journey is cruel and comical, but the destination clear."
By Ariella Budick – 04 June 2019
Liz Glynn commission for Bold Tendencies
Liz Glynn is included in Bold Tendencies' rooftop summer program (May 30 – September 21, 2019) in London with her project Unearthed Underground.
Unearthed Underground is a biomorphic network of tunnels spread over the Bold Tendencies' rooftop, some 22m wide and 15m long. The form of the network is taken from Joseph Bazalgette’s original London sewer system, tracing its tunnel network as it converges across London. Glynn’s installation uproots and re-casts this network onto the roof of the car park. The installation is marked by traces of the sewer's curious history: an inverted dinner party scene nodding to the three-hundred person banquet inaugurating the system, and a lost ceramic slipper from the Queen's parade through the tunnels. As a teenage punk in the 1990s, Glynn watched as indie and punk were subsumed by capitalism and now questions whether an "underground" is still possible under the regime of global capitalism. Inspired by the literature of Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo and CS Lewis - places where the underground represents a darker, fantastic and utopian space - Glynn is equally concerned with historical cases of those members of society operating literally and figuratively in the shadows below ground. The curving forms of the tunnels represent a time before rational urban planning was introduced; in Victorian London, straightening and widening the crocked streets was considered part of a broader effort at moral reform targeting the lower classes. Glynn likens the act of uprooting this sewer – which doubles as a circulatory system – to the current political climate, where the festering discomforts plaguing a society can no longer be ignored.
Nicole Eisenman in the Whitney Biennial reviewed in Frieze Magazine
"Outside, on the terrace, is Nicole Eisenman’s show-stopping Procession (2019), a motley parade of bronze, fibreglass and plaster figures, some of whom will slowly disintegrate in the summer rain. A jet-black giant pulls a cart atop which his pasty pal crouches, doggie-style, awaiting occasional puffs of smoke from his gaping anus. A faceless figure with trashcan lid cymbals seems unfazed by the farts in his face, or the cart’s bumper sticker, which inquires, ‘HOW’S MY SCULPTING? CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT’. (The answer is very good.) Each figure in this farcical tableau finds dumb, flatulent pleasure in the heavy load it bears – a lesson, perhaps, on how to handle life’s burdens.
Few living artists are as original as Eisenman."
By Evan Moffitt – 20 May 2019
Nicole Eisenman in the Whitney Biennial reviewed in the New York Times
"Sublime is certainly not a word I’d use for the excellences of Nicole Eisenman’s sculptural contribution. Spectacular is, particularly in the context of this anti-spectacle Biennial. Installed on the sixth floor terrace over the High Line, her shambolic tableaus of lurching figures in plaster, metal and Fiberglass embody the exhibition’s history-conjuring, identity-expanding, form-scrambling tendencies, and projects them loud, with a rude anarchic belch of a kind that’s otherwise missing from the show."
By Holland Cotter – 16 May 2019
Wangechi Mutu in the Whitney Biennial reviewed in Galerie Magazine
"There’s no better example of the diversity of this year’s biennial than Wangechi Mutu.
Not just because of who she is, a Kenya-born art star who splits her time between Nairobi and New York, but also because of the way her practice blends painting, immersive installations, performance, video, and other media."
By Ted Loos – 10 May 2019
Paul Mpagi Sepuya at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Organized by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator, with Misa Jeffereis, Assistant Curator, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents Paul Mpagi Sepuya's first major museum survey (May 17 – August 18, 2019).The artist’s first monograph will be published by CAM for this exhibition, featuring contributions by Grace Wales Bonner, fashion designer; Malik Gaines, writer, performer, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; Lucy Gallun, assistant curator of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ariel Goldberg, novelist, poet, and essayist; Evan Moffitt, writer, critic, and associate editor of Frieze; and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, writer and curatorial assistant at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Wangechi Mutu in the Whitney Biennial 2019
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Wangechi Mutu for her participation in the Whitney Biennial 2019.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya in the Whitney Biennial 2019
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Paul Mpagi Sepuya for his participation in the Whitney Biennial.
Nicole Eisenman in the Whitney Biennial 2019
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on her participation in the Whitney Biennial 2019.
Nicole Eisenman in the Venice Biennale reviewed in Frieze Magazine
"A highlight is Nicole Eisenman’s cosmic fusion of the everyday and eternity in five large new paintings: the longer you look, the more you see."
By Jennifer Higgie – 09 May 2019
Paul Mpagi Sepuya at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis previewed in Artforum
"Working primarily in the studio, often with mirrors that allow him to simultaneously reveal and conceal his subjects, Sepuya continues to sharpen his focus on queer communities and men of color—friends and lovers whose presence grounds his increasingly abstract work in genuine feeling."
By Vince Aletti – May 2019
Arlene Shechet reviewed in the Los Angeles Times
"It's been a long decade since Shechet's last solo show in L.A. Savor this one. Savor its tang, piquancy and sweetness, its friction and its hearty, infectious enthusiasm."
By Leah Ollman – 29 April 2019
Deborah Roberts reviewed in The Culture Type
"Full of personality and individuality, her endearing and artful collages of African American boys carry backstories freighted with fateful tragedy—historic lynchings and more recent killings by police and fear of living while black."
By Victoria L. Valentine – 23 April 2019
Deborah Roberts profiled in Mousse Magazine
"In her mixed-media works, artist Deborah Roberts acknowledges the syncretic nature of black female identity. Debunking societal definitions of ideal beauty and dress, as well as stereotypes of social media, she questions the construction of race and the racializing gaze endemic to Western culture. Her collages and text-based works not only articulate a critique of accepted typologies of the unified self but also affirm the untold value of difference."
By Roxana Marcoci – Spring 2019
Ellen Berkenblit at the MCA Chicago
Ellen Berkenblit will debut a mural titled Leopard's Lane for the latest installment of the MCA Chicago's second-floor lobby atrium project from May 4 to November 29, 2019. Leopard's Lane is organized by Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator.
Edgar Arceneaux awarded Mike Kelley Foundation grant
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Edgar Arceneaux for being awarded the Mike Kelly Foundation grant. The grant will support the production of the artist's new play "Boney Manilli," which will be debuted at the Ford Theater in August 2019.
Angel Otero profiled in artnet
"I’ve always embraced this idea of dancing with the personal and the historical in my work. I’ve used references to a number of from artists from that era—Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, and so on. My plan is not to get at what each individual artist or work means to me; it’s a formal decision more than anything else. For me, it’s like the way I choose a paint brush—it’s a kind of tool that I’m reactivating in my own language. My plan is not to reveal them directly; it’s about hopefully finding ways to transform them in ways that people are going to feel but not necessarily recognize."
By Taylor Dafoe – 10 April 2019
Nicole Eisenman previewed in Artforum
"Nicole Eisenman’s large-scale outdoor sculpture Grouping of Works from Fountain will be permanently installed at the redeveloped 401 Park building in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston in late spring. The work is an iteration of Eisenman’s Sketch for a Fountain, which made its international debut at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017."
09 April 2019
Nicole Eisenman previewed in Artsy
"In a statement, Eisenman said:
I’m happy to know the fountain will be situated in a place where people are likely to hang out and enjoy some leisure time. [...] I look forward to seeing kids climbing on the sculptures and this piece integrating into the fabric of life in the Fens.
The Münster version of Eisenman’s fountain was so popular in the German city that locals set about raising €800,000 ($900,000) to make the work permanent."
By Benjamin Sutton – 09 April 2019
Nicole Eisenman featured in Artforum
"Throughout her three decades of drawing, painting, and printmaking, Eisenman has patchworked a world from every possible art-historical mode of figuration, bending styles and techniques easily, and often comically, to her will. In her wildly varied body of work, a sensitively observed queer morphology surfaces."
By Johanna Fateman – April 2019
Pope.L profiled in The Observer
"It’s not often an artist sees the launch of three major exhibitions in the same city at the same time. This fall, though, Pope.L, a performance and installation artist known for his scathing and unsettling critiques of race and power, will see it happen."
By Paddy Johnson – 01 April 2019
Yunhee Min at the Hammer Museum
Organized by Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, Hammer Projects: Yunhee Min (March 28 – October 27, 2019) adapts the vibrant abstract imagery of her recent approach to painting to the steps of the lobby staircase, in the first Hammer Project to be oriented to the floor rather than the walls. Min completely alters the surface of the stairs themselves, while also making subtle modifications to the walls and lighting in the lobby to underscore how context impacts experience and enhance the visitors’ awareness of the architecture.
Nicole Eisenman on the cover of Artforum
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on her cover of Artforum's April issue. This issue includes a feature on the artist with text by Johanna Fateman.
Wangechi Mutu's forthcoming installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reported in the New York Times
"Ms. Mutu, a Kenyan-American artist known for her sculpture, film and performance work, will create a collection of sculptures for the niches in the museum’s facade. This will be the first time that art has been displayed on Richard Morris Hunt’s 1902 facade. The sculptures will be on view from Sept. 9 to Jan 12, 2020."
By Peter Libbey – 23 March 2019
Kim Dingle reviewed in the Los Angeles Times
"Time doesn’t stand still in Dingle’s sensuous paintings so much as it whirlpools into an ever-tightening — and ever-expanding — vortex. Simultaneously inescapable and irresistible, her exhibition makes room for ambivalence."
By David Pagel – 18 March 2019
Nicole Eisenman selected for the 58th Venice Biennale
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on her inclusion in the 58th Venice Biennale. The artist has been represented by the gallery since 2007 and will present works in the central exhibition May You Live In Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff. Works include Dark Light (2017) and Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017).
Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965) was a 2018 recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation prize, a 2015 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” and the winner of the 2013 Carnegie Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include "Baden Baden Baden," Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; “Dark Light,” “Now or Never,” Secession, Vienna, Austria; “Al-ugh-ories,” New Museum, New York; and “Dear Nemesis: Nicole Eisenman 1993 – 2013,” Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, ICA Philadelphia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA. A suite of new sculptures, Sketch for a Fountain (2017), was prominently featured in the 2017 Münster Skulptur Projekt. Eisenman’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the 2016 Biennale de Montreal; “American is Hard to See,” Whitney Museum of American Art; “Painting 2.0: Expression in the information Age,” Museum Brandhorst, Munich; “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” Museum of Modern Art, New York; Manifesta 10, the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; the 2013 Carnegie International; and the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She is participating in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya on cover of Artforum
Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Paul Mpagi Sepuya on his cover of Artforum's March issue. This issue includes a feature on the artist with text by editor-in-chief David Velasco.
Deborah Roberts joins Vielmetter Los Angeles
Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce its representation of Deborah Roberts. The artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery will open in April 2019 at our downtown location.
Deborah Roberts (b. 1962) lives and works in Austin, TX. Roberts makes collages using photographs, magazine clippings, and images from the internet, with a unique visual language evoking African-American womanhood to explore the subjects of beauty, identity and politics.
Roberts is the recipient of The Anonymous Was a Woman award was presented to Roberts in 2018. Forthcoming group exhibitions include ‘Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage', Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (2019) and ‘Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary', Californian African American Museum (CAAM), Los Angeles, USA (2019). Selected exhibitions include: 'Deborah Roberts: The Evolution of Mimi', Spelman Museum, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (2018); 'Reclamation! Pan-African from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection', Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia, USA (2018); 'Talisman In The Age Of Difference', Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2018); 'Legacy of the Cool: A Tribute to Barkley L. Hendricks', MassArt, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (2018);' Constructing Identity in America (1766-2017)', Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, USA; ‘Fictions, Studio Museum of Harlem', New York, New York, USA (2017); 'I know why the caged bird sings', Carver Museum, Austin, Texas, USA (2016); 'Gently Fried', MACC, Austin, Texas, USA (2015); 'The House on Mango Street', National Mexican American Museum, Chicago, Illinois, USA (2015).
Roberts' work is in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, Kentucky; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, New York; Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, Florida; LACMA, Los Angeles, California; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; and Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2016.
Mickalene Thomas profiled in Artsy
Mickalene Thomas is included in Arty's list of The Most Influential African-American Artists.
"Thomas views herself as a painter, but all of her paintings begin with photographs and studies of her subjects—family, friends, former lovers, her partner—often set against stylized backdrops of living-room interiors like those of her childhood. Thomas’s paintings are historical interventions that trace intimate relationships between her practice, the formal radicality of modernism, and its outright plunder of Africa."
By Andrea Andersson, The Helis Foundation Chief Curator of Visual Arts, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans – 25 February 2019
Pope.L profiled in Artsy
Pope.L is included in Arty's list of The Most Influential African-American Artists.
"It’s never what you expect—Pope.L’s performances, installations, drawings, and paintings often play in the edge of the absurd to tackle weighty issues in society."
By Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art – 25 February 2019
Rodney McMillian solo exhibition at SFMOMA
Curated by Jenny Gheith (Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA), New Work: Rodney McMillian (February 9 – June 9, 2019) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art marks the artist's first solo museum presentation on the West Coast. In this exhibition, McMillian brings together his long-standing interest in the representation of the American landscape with an exploration of home as a place and a state of mind.
New Work: Rodney McMillian features a painted abstract panorama spanning the entirety of the gallery, paired with a soundscape interweaving iconic 1980s songs performed by McMillian and the voice of a social advocate proposing radically new language and polices around the condition of homelessness. This immersive installation questions the political systems that promise freedom and equality for all, and highlights the power of the individual to affect hope and create change.
Mary Kelly at DesertX
Mary Kelly's site-specific project for Desert X titled Peace is the Only Shelter returns to the Cold War intervention of Women Strike for Peach, a group formed in 1961 to protest against nuclear weapons testing in the Mojave Desert.
The project description reads: A long period of research led Mary Kelly to repurpose Cold War–era peace activism, in this case the anti-nuclear Women Strike for Peace (WSP), formed in 1961. This feminist group initiated lobbies, petitions, vigils, and demonstrations against nuclear testing. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests, mostly in the desert Southwest. The artist notes, “Although the radical peace initiatives of women in the early post-war period have been largely forgotten, the action-oriented interventions of the Women Strike for Peace set a precedent for the non-hierarchical politics of second-wave feminism, as well as the many prominent protest movements currently underway.” This counter-history takes on renewed significance amid today’s escalated tensions worldwide. A central feature of Kelly’s similarly public intervention is the so-called Doomsday Clock, whose hands tick closer to midnight as militarism rises and humanity inches closer to self-destruction. The allegory in Peace is the Only Shelter is reshaped as a bus shelter, itself a representative timetable. The intervention in public space calls attention to vestiges of the Cold War in our contemporary context, employing slogans from the WSP, where normally there would be advertisements, and cartographies of military expansion in the California desert, where there would be routes and schedules.
Locations:
531 S. Palm Canyon
33.815465, -116.546812
457-467 S. Indian Canyon Drive
33.816646, -116.545421
Southwest corner of Ramon Road and S. Indian Canyon Drive.
33.815720, -116.545957